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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

GOOD MINISTERS OF JESUS CHRIST 
A MAN'S RELIGION 



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THIS MIND 



BY 

WILLIAM FRASER McDOWELL 

One of the Bishops of the 
Methodist Episcopal Church 



'Have this mind in you, which was also 
in Christ Jesus" 




THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






Copyright, 1922, by 
WILLIAM FRASER McDOWELL 



Printed in the United States of America 



JUN -9 1922 

©CI.A677039 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Foreword 7 

Preface 9 

I. This Mind Toward Life's Deci- 
sions — I 15 

II. This Mind Toward Life's Deci- 
sions — II 40 

III. This Mind Toward Life's Objects ... 67 

IV. This Mind Toward the Strength of 

Life 98 

V. This Mind Toward Other Persons. . .123 

VI. This Mind Toward Life's Essential 

Tests 153 



FOREWORD 

The Mendenhall Lectures of DePauw Univer- 
sity, to which this series of addresses belongs, 
was founded by the Reverend Marmaduke H. 
Mendenhall, D.D., of the North Indiana Confer- 
ence of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The 
object of the donor was to found a perpetual lec- 
tureship which would bring to the University as 
lecturers "persons of high and wide repute, of 
broad and varied scholarship, who firmly adhere 
to the evangelical system of Christian faith. The 
selection of lecturers may be made from the world 
of Christian scholarship, without regard to de- 
nominational divisions. Each course of lectures 
is to be published in book form by an eminent 
publishing house and sold at cost to the faculty 
and students of the university." 

Lectures thus far published under this founda- 
tion: 

1913, The Bible and Life, Edwin Holt 
Hughes. 

1914, The Literary Primacy of the Bible, 
George Peck Eckman. 

1917, Understanding the Scriptures, Francis 
John McConnell. 

1918, Religion and War, William H. P. Faunce. 

7 



8 FOREWORD 

1919, Some Aspects of International Christian- 
ity, John Kelman. 

1920, What Must the Church Do to Be Saved? 
Ernest Fremont Tittle. 

1921, Social Rebuilders, Charles Reynolds 
Brown. 

1922, This Mind, William Fraser McDowell. 



PREFACE 

The Mendenhall Lectures for 1922 at DePauw 
University were prepared and spoken with 
the desire that they might really assist members 
of the student body in making their decisions for 
lifework and service in the world to which they 
are so rapidly coming. The lectures are not a 
plea for youth to enter the ministry or mission 
field, though such a discussion would have 
pleased the lecturer. He desired in this course 
to state as clearly as he could some of those prin- 
ciples which should govern young people facing 
their life decisions and lifework no matter what 
their particular calling is to be. For it seems to 
thoughtful students of our age that a new conse- 
cration of life in all occupations, a new testing 
of life in all callings by the principles of Jesus 
Christ, and a new reference of life to his mind or 
attitude toward it are imperatively called for, if 
individual life itself or the human world is to be 
saved. This will explain the method, the treat- 
ment and the spirit of the lectures. 

It is hoped that the printed volume may be 
useful to young people in the supremely critical 
and important period when they are deciding 
what they will do with their lives. If it helps 

9 



10 PREFACE 

them to make their decisions in the light of Jesus' 
life, to have in themselves toward their lives 
the mind that was in him toward his life, the 
author will be content. He will have no doubt 
or fear as to the outcome. It is hoped that the 
small volume may be useful also to pastors and 
teachers, to the advisors of youth in Student Con- 
ferences, Young People's Institutes, Student 
Volunteer meetings, colleges, high schools, 
churches, Sunday schools, and elsewhere where 
young people are seeking advice and counsel on 
this vital subject. 

It is especially hoped by the lecturer that the 
volume may assist and guide parents in their 
relation to their children's decisions. Here is 
a real difficulty. Many parents are actually 
standing in the way of their children's decision 
according to the mind of Christ, Real parental 
interest and right are carried often far beyond 
their proper limit into the realm of the life de- 
cisions of their children. Many students, known 
to me, have been prevented from the acceptance 
of what has seemed a clear call of the Master 
because their parents have had other plans for 
them. We older people are quite likely to think 
that our right to control life covers not only our 
own lives, but the lives of our children and grand- 
children. It is my conviction after years of 
observation that the principles here stated should 



PREFACE 11 

govern parents in their attitude to their chil- 
dren's lifework, just as truly as they should 
govern the attitude of the young people them- 
selves. It is a serious thing for parents to set 
their own wills and preferences in opposition to 
the evident will of God for their children's lives. 
Those parents who have run with the will of 
God and the highest desires of their children in 
their response to it have had the largest joy in 
the outcome. If the Master wants the son or 
daughter of any parents reading these lines, for 
any service anywhere in the world, let the Master 
have his wonderful way. His wish is the suffi- 
cient motive and reason. 

It would have been a pleasure to add a lec- 
ture showing from the actual lives of other men 
and women how they have responded to the 
Master's wish. Maybe in some future time such 
an addition may be made, either in this book 
or outside of it. How did Frederick W. Robert- 
son, Phillips Brooks, Henry Drummond, James 
Chalmers, Alice Freeman Palmer, William H. 
Baldwin, Dr. William T. Grenfell, and others 
come to the decisions that led them into the 
lives they led and the work they did? How did 
Jesus Christ get his chance in such lives? 
Through what perplexities, over what difficulties 
and oppositions, under what influences did these 
and others reach that final determination that 



12 PEEFACE 






led to such commanding results in their lives? 
Maybe it is just as well that no attempt is made 
here to show the experience of individuals. May- 
be it is better that in colleges, schools, confer- 
ences, institutes and other groups young men 
and women should by their own reading kindle 
their lives at the fire of these other lives. Of 
this I am certain, that the youth of this day 
and succeeding days will not come to their true 
place of life or service in the world except as 
they walk in the spirit and light of those im- 
mortal souls who have struck step and kept step 
with the Master of all good life and work. 

I am under great obligation to my dear 
friends, the Keverends James C. Baker, William 
J. Davidson, John K. Edwards, Victor G. Mills, 
and Oscar T. Olson, for reading the manuscripts 
before the lectures were presented at DePauw, 
and for making many most valuable criticisms 
and suggestions. 

And my gratitude to the faculty and students 
of DePauw and the people of Greencastle for 
their cordiality and kindness during the three 
days when the lectures were being spoken is 
deep and lasting. Above all I am grateful for 
the enlarged satisfaction that this new study of 
the manifold life of Jesus has brought. His 
meaning for life is an evergrowing wonder and 
splendor. What it may grow to when it has full 



PREFACE 13 

opportunity in human life does not yet appear. 
What human life and service may become when 
Jesus Christ is perfectly formed in them, or 
when they have put on Christ, we may see in some 
new revelation of life even in our day. Perhaps 
that is our next great spiritual adventure and 
achievement. The fellowship of Jesus in life 
decision and life service, the sharing of his prin- 
ciples and purposes, the identification of per- 
sonal life with him, and the merging of it into his 
seem to me to be youth's supreme advantage and 
privilege. 



THIS MIND TOWARD LIFE'S 
DECISIONS— I 

One of our minor pleasures, in certain moods, 
is the cheerful business of putting together pic- 
ture-puzzles. The exercise calls into activity 
several powers, such as the sense of shape and 
color, patience and imagination, and the ability 
to visualize a cosmos in the presence of a chaos. 
One of the happy, less irksome ways of teaching 
geography follows the picture-puzzle method. 
Of course the whole thing, whether used for 
diversion or instruction, has some real limita- 
tions. The only thing you can do is to restore 
the pieces to their original place in the map or 
the picture. If the process comes out at all, it 
comes out the same way every time. Always "as 
it was in the beginning" so it "is now" and so 
it "ever shall be, world without end." The pro- 
cess is not at all creative. It leaves no place for 
freedom, originality, or initiative. Indiana al- 
ways goes into the same place, between Ohio and 
Illinois, and there is no place for Texas and New 
York except their own place. 

Some years ago the world blew up, and the 
15 



16 THIS MIND 

pieces came down in a heap ; pieces of every size, 
shape, and color; ragged, torn pieces; soiled, 
marred pieces, with lots of pieces utterly miss- 
ing. And all over our world men are trying to 
put them together, either as they were or in some 
new adjustment. Putting a picture-puzzle to- 
gether is a game or a recreation, remaking a 
sawed-up map an academic activity. But the 
world business is wholly serious. Worlds have 
no business blowing up like this. You can spill 
a puzzle or a map and cheerfully go to work to 
put it together again; but if the world is going 
to behave like this with any frequency, life can 
never be cheerful again, no matter how brave it 
may be. 

This process of reconstruction is at present 
all absorbing. If the word had not existed, we 
must have invented it as we did others. For 
all our principal people, either in groups or in- 
dividually, promptly set out on the business of 
reconstruction, some of them vocally, some of 
them really. And all the old groups appeared 
again. Thoroughgoing conservatives tried to put 
the pieces together as they had' been before, to 
make as little change as possible. It has not been 
a very encouraging period for a crass conserva- 
tive. Some frankly do not even care to try to re- 
place the pieces in their original places or rela- 
tions. They prefer a brand-new combination with 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 17 

a lot of the old stuff left out altogether, either to 
be burned or junked. Some of these are just 
plain radicals rejoicing in the opportunity for 
overthrow and destruction. Some are true be- 
lievers soberly looking for a new world. They 
see the rough and ragged edges in some of the 
old relations, the rotten, sham materials in some 
of the old fabrics, but they are not downhearted. 
They know that the process will take time, that 
it must be as thorough as the new birth, for men 
and nations, that it will test men even more 
severely than did the swift and stormy years of 
the war, and yet they bear into it with "hearts 
courageous." They lack wisdom, but they re- 
joice in the unrebuking promise to those who 
ask for wisdom they mean to use. 

And the lines of the rebuilders run into one 
another. This is no task for one man or one 
group. Life's interests and departments inter- 
penetrate. The economic policies of the world 
do bear upon its religious and intellectual life. 
The forms of government are related to the faith, 
the education, the economic condition, and the 
character of the people. We cannot rebuild the 
modern Nehemiah's wall if we disregard any gate 
of it or regard any part of it as unimportant. 

These lines also run into other realms and 
regions of life. I suppose God's relation to the 
world is at least a threefold relation. It is 



18 THIS MIND 

creative or constructive, it is educational or 
evolutionary, and it is reconstructive or redemp- 
tive. Only the half gods concern themselves with 
part of a god's occupation. We are probably in 
the third act of the divine drama. In the first 
act the human soul appears as the climax of crea- 
tion. And it was so good that the morning stars 
sang over it. In the second act Jesus appeared 
as the climax of revelation. And that was so 
good that the angels sang their song of glory. 
In the third act the kingdom of heaven, the new 
heaven, the new earth, a redeemed humanity, a 
redeemed world will appear. And that will be 
so good that the host that no man can number 
will break out in the new song never yet heard. 
(See Cairns' Reasonableness of the Christian l 
Faith. ) 

In this third act we are now. We are in it 
with the Master of all life and destiny. In a 
very peculiar sense the youth of to-day, and 
particularly the college youth of to-day, are in 
it with Him. For the issue of all this world 
movement, this quest of man and God for a new 
world, will humanly depend upon the men and 
women who will make, shape and determine 
the next quarter of a century. They are the 
makers of to-morrow. 

This is a long, perhaps a blind, introduction 
to what I mean to try to say. Maybe the dis- 



, TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 19 

cussion will not equal the theme. I do not flatter 
myself with pride or deceive myself with false 
hope. Eeally I shall be content to stand here by 
the fountain gate and make so loud an outcry 
that the builders of the wall will put this gate in 
order and in place. 

Now no one of us chooses the time of his com- 
ing into the world. We are born and live our 
lives in the world as it is when we live. We may 
fret and complain because we were not allowed 
to live at some other period, under other condi- 
tions, but fretting and complaining are not very 
noble attitudes. (We can go through a period 
like our own, saying with Hamlet : 

"The world is out of joint, 
Oh cursed spite, that ever I was born 
To set it right/' 

But Hamlet is not the most useful character in 
literature or history. I do not commend his 
attitude to you. A man carrying a personal 
grievance like that cannot carry much else. His- 
tory is full of finer figures. It would be inter- 
esting to study a lot of them. Indeed, I see no 
way of properly getting into our age unless we 
know how the best men and women of other ages 
got into theirs. For in a very real sense every one 
of us is born in the fullness of time. Some ful- 
fill the purpose for which they are born when and 



20 THIS MIND 

where they are, and these become world bene- 
factors. Others fail, some for one reason, some 
for another, and these become the world's failures 
or tragedies. The teacher of history has about 
the best chance there is to reveal to youth the 
meaning and value of personality. He can show 
to men and women having only one life each the 
importance of placing that life according to right 
principles, in the right spirit, and in the right 
place. He can show the real meaning of life deci- 
sions, which are not primarily decisions to be 
preachers, or teachers, or doctors or lawyers. 
Which of these one will be is really the secondary 
question of life, the question one is not prepared 
to answer until the earlier, more fundamental 
one has been settled. The teacher of history, 
who at his best is really the teacher of life, can 
show the necessity of reaching these primary 
decisions in the light of the best examples. Does 
he know anyone who has really shown what a 
man may be, what a man may try, what a man 
may do? If so, he has in his hand a wisdom, a 
truth valuable beyond rubies or any other 
precious thing, for examples are ever better than 
rules in this holy game of life. The rules, the 
principles at last come from the persons who 
have done it or who have failed. If any man has 
truly served his generation, he is the real gleam. 
After him, follow him. More than once in these 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 21 

purely personal studies one sentence written by 
one man of another is likely to break out: "In 
him was life, and the life was the light of men." 

And that sentence introduces us to another 
fundamental principle, the principle that we 
must follow the best person there is, that there 
is no first-class product based on a second-class 
model. I think I must bear down on this in view 
of what I mean to try to say before we are 
through. For many years it has been my high 
privilege to speak to America's youth. Not so 
many years remain as have gone. Before the 
end of the years is reached I must as often and 
as clearly as possible bear and reaffirm my testi- 
mony. This is it: If I knew one who faced his 
age and all ages in better spirit, greater wisdom, 
or truer devotion than Jesus showed, I would 
commend and follow him. If I knew any better 
plan for a personal life than Jesus' plan, I would 
commend and adopt it. If I knew any better 
basis for life decisions than Jesus' basis for his 
own life decision, I would commend it and rest 
my life on it. If I knew a better outcome in any 
life than the outcome seen in Jesus' life, I would 
try to go the way that reached it. 

I have passed through many forms of personal 
question in my life. Some of them have ceased 
to be important, some of them remain un- 
answered. But I quote Robert Browning's words 



22 THIS MIND 

to-day and answer them affirmatively without a 
quiver or a hesitation : 

"What think ye of Christ, friend, when all's done and 

said? 
Like you this Christianity or not? 
It may be false, but would you have it true? 
Has it your vote to be so if it can ?" 

/Jesus Christ has my vote, and he has it whether 
he gets any other votes or not. Maybe no one 
else will vote for him, but I will not condition my 
vote on the amount of popular support he gets. 
I will not say I will be one of ten. I vote for 
him, not because others are going to do it, but 
solely because he deserves an unscratched ballot 
from me. He is the best that has appeared, the 
best that does appear. He gets me. I go along 
with him. After all the years you simply cannot 
think of anyone else. No one else is in his class. 
And there must be no half-heartedness or divi- 
sion in our loyalty to him. Dragging along after 
a half god is a desperately wearisome business. 
Partial allegiance to a perfect god is almost the 
last thing in futility and dreariness. Nothing 
but thoroughness can save us here. Half carry- 
ing, half dragging the yoke of fellowship will 
chafe and gall. Casual, shallow, trivial, reserved 
obedience will not answer. You can go the whole 
length with him and live, live royally, live exult- 
ingly and victoriously, but if you only partially 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 23 

enthrone him, or if yon crown him with mental 
reservations, you will not get far. 

I am not trying to make this appear easy. One 
of the saddest things in our time is the easy, 
jaunty air of these shallow loyalties and obedi- 
ences. Anything that goes to the depths is toler- 
ably certain to hurt. The ease and flippancy of 
halfway reliance upon and halfway loyalty to 
the half gods have got us into our present trouble. 
There is onty one way out. Life decisions made 
lightly, as one should choose a cravat or order a 
meal, may be easily made. You can get great 
numbers of decisions at meetings of a certain 
sort and under a certain kind of appeal. But you 
do not get the men and women who will finally 
count for Christ unless these life decisions are 
made face to face with Christ and the makers 
know what 'it cost for him to make his own life 
decisions. 

Many forms of question have arisen and passed 
in my lifetime. Some of them disturbed the 
churches very much. I think my chief concern 
to-day is that the makers of to-morrow shall take 
Jesus Christ seriously as an authority and ex- 
ample, and that they shall firmly believe that the 
principles of Jesus can be applied, must be 
applied to themselves and other men and women. 
Can his principles for his own life be used by 
John Smith, freshman or senior? They could 



24 THIS MIND 

be used by Jesus. No others seem possible as 
you look at him. You cannot get a life like his 
on any other basis. Maybe the glory that will 
come to your generation will be the genuine 
discovery by thousands of college men and 
women that the principles of that other life are 
the only principles for their lives. Pretty much 
everything else has been tried first and last. Let 
us in all heartiness try this. 

Of course this is not a gay, jaunty business. 
It is not putting together a picture-puzzle for 
an hour's diversion. It is, at last, putting to- 
gether in proper place and proper relation the 
forces of eternal life. Seeing the best person do 
it with his own life is better than being in at 
the creation of a planet or a dozen planets. 
Really I would rather understand the working 
of Jesus' mind, know his attitude, his disposi- 
tion concerning his own life in the world than 
anything else in the realm of knowledge. ( I am 
using the familiar translation, being familiar, of 
course, with Weymouth's : "Let the same disposi- 
tion be in you" — and Moffat's "Treat one another 
with the same spirit as you experience in Christ 
Jesus" — and the Twentieth Century New Testa- 
ment: "Let the Spirit of Christ Jesus be yours.") 

And now let us look naturally and steadily at 
some of those essential principles upon which 
Jesus proceeded in his life decisions. Let us 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 25 

look at him as we would at John Wesley or 
Phillips Brooks or Abraham Lincoln if we were 
trying to find out how they decided what to do 
with their lives. Only let us remember that in 
the case of Jesus a perfect result was reached. 
We must, therefore, be extra careful to find the 
way by which he reached it. This is a real study 
in biography, undertaken by serious people who 
earnestly want to know how to make a life, and 
who go, wisely, to the one person who made the 
outstanding success of history in that important 
matter. This is not a study as to why one should 
be a preacher, or a lawyer, or a missionary, or 
a teacher, or an editor, but a study of some of 
the principles upon which the Supreme Person 
of time based his life. Making a life on those 
principles is surely the primary, fundamental 
thing. The other questions will answer them- 
selves if we find the answer to this one. 

First: I think the ultimate basis upon which 
his life decision was made and on which it was 
worked out in his life was his sense of God. I 
wish I could say this as it really ought to be 
said. I never coveted more earnestly the high- 
est gifts of religious and personal speech. I do 
not want to speak theologically, or conventional- 
ly, or to say anything that may even sound like 
an outworn shibboleth. If any half dozen intelli- 
gent persons were to be asked to name the out- 



26 THIS MIND 

standing fact in the consciousness of Jesus con- 
cerning his life nearly a half dozen different 
answers would be received. One would promptly 
answer that the deepest thing in his life was his 
idea and spirit of service and sacrifice; another 
that it was his power over human and natural 
forces as seen in the wonders he performed; 
another that it was his wisdom as seen in his un- 
paralleled teaching; another that it was the 
Kingdom of which he was ever speaking, for 
which he was ever striving. And all these 
answers would be tolerably true. These things 
and many others are so real, so fundamental in 
his life that his life does really seem in large 
measure to rest on them. Still, they do not seem 
to go quite to the rock bottom. The real basis 
seems to be that he was, in Browning's words, 
"very sure of God." One must use a familiar 
word and at once many persons knowing that 
word will think it is used in the sense in which 
they commonly use it. We must try, therefore, 
even with the familiar term to convey a deeper, 
more personal, perhaps unfamiliar meaning. Us- 
ing negatives is not a very fruitful process in 
interpretation, but I will use one or two never- 
theless. Saying that God was the basis of his 
life is not the same as saying that Jesus firmly 
believed in God, though of course he did. It is 
not the same as saying that he genuinely knew 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 27 

God, though of course he did. It is not the same 
as saying that he had either a creed or experience 
of which God was the center and basis, though 
he did have both. One may never rid himself 
of presuppositions in such matters as this, but 
one must never allow the presuppositions he 
brings to such a study to cloud or prevent an 
original, fresh, fundamental vision if it can be 
had. Maybe our next great discovery in personal 
religion, and, if so, for personal life, will be the 
discovery of the real, personal meaning of God 
in the life of Jesus. We need not speak as 
mystics nor with spiritual extravagance, but we 
surely never have got to the real bottom of the 
meaning, the fact, the place of God in the life of 
Jesus. His consciousness of God has been called 
"the greatest spiritual fact that has ever emerged 
in the long story of the human race" (Robertson, 
Spiritual Pilgrimage of Jesus, p. 13 ) . And yet 
the church has made a doctrine of God's nature 
and character, a definition of God where Jesus 
never did make one. And the church has too 
largely missed the personal meaning of God in 
Jesus' own life; failed to emphasize and set out 
for other young men the relation between the 
life decisions of Jesus, the lifework of Jesus, and 
his sense of God, his consciousness of God, his 
constant treatment of God as the very basis of it 
all. 



28 THIS MIND 

This determined his decisions, his activities, 
his purposes, his spirit and everything else that 
went to make him what we see him to be. This 
gave depth, transparency and steadiness to his 
life. This furnished a foundation for other prin- 
ciples of decision and activity as we shall shortly 
see. Thomas Arnold complained of the Rugby 
boys that "God was not in all their thoughts," 
meaning that God was not in their thoughts at 
all. One has only to say that to see at once that 
Jesus had no thoughts at all about his life that 
God was not in. 

One of the sermons much and deservedly much 
referred to a generation or two ago was Horace 
Bushnell's famous sermon on the subject, "Every 
Man's Life a Plan of God." It gave to many 
hundreds of men a sober sense that life was 
sacred, that God had a personal interest in what 
it should be, that it made a difference to God him- 
self whether a man, any man, accepted God's 
plan for his life or made one for himself leaving 
God out of consideration as he made it. Many a 
man with no purpose of doing wrong makes his 
own plans and either presents them to God for 
his blessing or goes through life leaving God 
wholly to one side. But even Bushnell's mighty 
topic does not quite say what needs to be said. 
God does not make a plan for a life like Jesus 
Christ's and hand it to him to adopt and work 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 29 

out. God is not a life-plan maker like that, Nor 
is God the divine helper of persons who make 
their own plans. He is the abiding personal 
basis upon which true men and women make 
their life plans, life decisions and life endeavors. 
One most careful student writes: "It is surely 
fair to begin where Jesus began: and Jesus be- 
gan with God" (Hutton, The Proposal of Jesus, 
p. 64). And another as though foreseeing our 
need for such a word says: "The object of Jesus 
was to induce men to base all life on God" 
( Glover, Jesus of History, 1 p. 113 ) . But we are 
always failing to see that Jesus had a faith and 
a practice of his own. His object was to induce 
men to base all life on God, and his method was 
to base all his own life on that supreme person. 
His teachings for other men lie firmly in his 
beliefs and principles for himself. And I know 
no way for you to start right in making your life 
decisions except the way of Jesus; no way to 
reach a right decision for your life if you leave 
God out of it or give him a secondary place in 
it. There is no way to avoid the "fuss and fret," 
the distraction, shallowness, and selfishness that 
mar our decisions and spoil our lives except 
Jesus' way. We, like him, must rest our lives 
upon God, identify our lives with God, make his 
business our business, his house our house, and 

1 Association Press, New York. Publishers. 



30 THIS MIND 

do it joyfully even as Jesus did. He evidently 
thought it the best thing for him to base his life 
upon God. The outcome fully justifies that act. 
By doing it he tried to teach and induce the rest 
of us so to do it. This is the way the best life 
on earth was reached and maintained. Until a 
better life has been reached on some other basis 
let us follow this one. 

Second: Even before we are done with the 
discussion of this basic principle of Jesus' life 
decision, another principle emerges both from it 
and with it,/ The New Testament is a relentless 
book. Once give it a grip on you and it carries 
you irresistibly to all the implications and con- 
clusions involved. Christianity is not a religion 
of electives, in which you can choose the things 
you like and ignore the others. j Men have always 
been trying to keep or get right relations with 
God as though that were the essence and whole of 
religion. And many men making their life deci- 
sions have piously said: "I will do what God 
wants me to do," as though that true and pious 
principle covered the whole case. Jesus never 
got into that personal and religious fog. He 
did not try to solve the personal or the religious 
problem by any false methods. He boldly, con- 
sistently, and thoroughly went the whole length 
to which his supreme avowals carried him. He 
never hedged on his faith in God, for example, 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 31 

because that faith would surely lead him to a 
faith in men and a service for men, absolutely 
new in the world. 

So the principle of life decision based upon 
the fact of God's place in his life is matched by 
the principle of man's deepest need for his life. 
He had God ; men needed God. His life was full 
of God; men were out of joint with Him. Jesus 
sees their need and responds to it, without hesita- 
tion, because this is the inexorable logic of his 
own sense and vision of God. What saved his life 
from destruction must be taken by him to men 
already destroyed and being destroyed for lack 
of it. No matter where this carries him, he must 
go where it leads. He cannot take up half the 
burden of human need and retain to the full the 
consciousness of God in his own life. He cannot 
keep on using the words "fellowship," "commun- 
ion" and "oneness" unless he perfectly identifies 
himself, in a perfect and loving service, with all 
that wretched humanity that is catalogued by all 
the disagreeable terms like "leper," "prodigal," 
"harlot," "thief," and "sinner." It was not a 
vague, rhetorical enthusiasm for an idealized 
humanity that moved him. It was not the fire of 
a reformer that burned in him. He was not set 
on writing a thesis on the social conditions of 
the Jews or any other group. He never made a 
chart or issued a questionnaire. He was not a 



32 THIS MIND 

"parlor" social worker. He was as conscious of 
men as of God. His contacts with people, indi- 
vidual people, were as direct and immediate as 
his contacts with God. He could not live with- 
out God. By the same token he could not live 
without Peter and other men. Our language 
breaks down in the attempt to put this relation of 
himself to men's deepest needs, this absolute 
identification of himself with men on the basis 
of their need. It was not the same as saying, "I 
am one of you, one with you, in your character, 
in your spiritual infirmity, your moral sickness." 
Any one might have said that and no cure or 
relief have followed. He was for men, for men 
who were not what they ought to be, for them 
that they might become what they ought to be. 
What was the good of such relation to God as 
he sustained if men were to go on in prison, in 
ignorance, in hunger, in moral wreck, in spiritual 
helplessness, just as before? This is man's actual 
state but not his right state. And no principle 
of life decision that does not propose to cure, 
change, remove all that, is like Jesus' principle. 
The world of men did not know it, does not 
know it to-day, but Jesus proposed as a lifework 
to touch every man at the point of his deepest 
needs. His world, like ours, was ready to deal 
with secondary needs, like restoring the King- 
dom, like giving people physical health, physical 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 33 

coinfort, and material welfare. You will be 
tempted to make your life decisions on some form 
of this basis. It looks more immediate and 
direct than the other. But in dealing with men 
he went clear to the bottom of the eternal strug- 
gle between the partial and the complete, between 
the secondary and the primary, between the 
superficial and the thorough treatment of our 
human need. The struggle is still on, on in all 
lands, all religions and all classes. I want 
the youth of my day, the youth of Christ's church 
to stand with him in his attitude to men and his 
proposed service to men. There is no other right 
place to stand. 

The human world is wrong in the soul, the 
heart, the character of it. It is not simply un- 
developed or misguided or belated. It dresses well 
and it dresses poorly, its manners are refined and 
its manners are vulgar, but neither a change of 
clothes or manners will reach the real need. I 
am purposely making this as hard and as high 
as I can. That is the way Jesus did. He did not 
reach his life decision for his life on the basis 
of a partial faith in God or a minor operation 
on humanity. It is enough to set all the college 
yells in Christendom going at their best for the 
college youth of Christendom to see a person like 
Jesus who unhesitatingly gave himself to the 
making over of a humanity that is morally wrong, 



34 THIS MIND 

morally hopeless without him and morally help- 
less apart from him. I have simply got to go 
with a person who has a spirit like that. If any- 
thing like that is going on in the world, under 
such a leader, I simply must be in it with him. 

Third: We have spoken of two fundamental 
realities that must be reckoned with by any one 
making his own life decision, deciding what mind 
shall be in him. These realities are God the 
Author, the Father, the Redeemer of life; and 
humanity the expression, the embodiment, the 
climax and interest of life itself. There is a 
third reality which must belong to each of the 
others, though it may stand somehow between 
them. That third reality is a human personality, 
a man, a woman. Through this third reality God 
reaches the second with help and light and power. 
Through it the second is guided on the way to 
God, on the way of life with God. It is this 
third reality, this man, this woman that makes 
life decisions, whose life decisions are so impor- 
tant, f And by a perfectly natural law the person 
reaching the decision must have absolute regard 
for his own highest self in the doing of it. This 
pillar must not sag if the structure is to be per- 
fect. Always a person, like Jesus, must make his 
decisions at the highest level of what he is, and 
in the light of what he may become as he works 
it all out with God in and for humanity. There 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 35 

is something to be saved besides humanity. The 
saviours of humanity must themselves be saved 
and not lost in their task. 

Now, I know the talk that is current on this 
theme. ; We easily laugh at Emerson's picture 
of the wagon and the star. We talk wisely about 
keeping our feet on the ground and our wagon 
on the well-paved road. Ordinary good sense is 
much praised by us in these days of mistaken 
democracy, the democracy of leveling down, the 
democracy of the common average.j A very 
prevalent skepticism is that which doubts and 
distrusts our best judgment, our highest ideals. 
W T e call some men visionaries as though they who 
have no vision were superior beings. A college 
student, only one, I am glad to say, out of thou- 
sands, once said to me, "No one reaches his deci- 
sions on this level." The answer is that Jesus 
did. The world would have perished if he or 
some one had not. The world is blessed and 
enriched with a new chance whenever one does. 

You can open the story at any one of several 
places which will readily occur to you, but every 
time you see him you see that he is holding fast 
to the highest, is saying that what is best must 
be chosen, that he must not let down either in 
making his choice or in fulfilling it. The great 
names of Jewish history were familiar to him — 
Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, and the rest. 



36 THIS MIND 

He must not drop below them. He must go far 
beyond them. That is what any youth owes to 
the noblest figures in his own nation's history or 
in the world's history. A nation is already far 
gone toward death when its youth has only a 
historic interest in the Washingtons, the Lin- 
colns, and the Roosevelts whose lives it does not 
expect to fulfill and surpass. 

Jesus knew the history of that race from which 
he had sprung, that forward-looking people with 
the expectation of its seers and prophets ever 
reaching toward golden days. He knew the wist- 
ful spirit in which they had died without seeing 
what they looked for. And his whole bearing 
is as of one who said : "By God's grace it shall be 
seen. There will be one person who will keep the 
faith, who will follow the gleam." He knew the 
sustaining, inspiring ideals of the old men who 
dreamed dreams and the young men who saw 
visions ; he knew the long, sad way of redeeming 
a race, a race blind and dumb and willful. He 
had the awful knowledge of mankind that makes 
other men prudent and sensible, that destroys 
what they call their illusions as to the outcome 
for mankind. And with a high heart he bore into 
it, "never doubting clouds would break." When 
a cross threw its dreadful shadow across the path 
in front of him he cried out with joy that it was 
worth a cross. When shame drew near to depress 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 37 

and blacken him, he despised it and trampled on 
it, seeing that he was on his way to bring many 
sons to glory. 

When, therefore, anyone says that it cannot 
be done like this, the answer is that Jesus did 
it like this. If anyone says that it is not being 
done like that this year, that young men and 
women are not using that pattern this year, the 
answer is that we can make this a new year of 
the Lord by adopting this pattern again and mak- 
ing it universal. 

Do I make myself clear? Our life decisions 
must be made when we are at our best, the best 
we are, the best we may be; when we are doing 
the straightest, best, clearest thinking; when the 
highest influences are running at full tide in our 
lives; when there is the least of selfishness and 
fear and doubt in us, and the most of love, 
courage, and faith. All our ambitions, all our 
decisions must come from life's highest levels, or 
life itself drops to the dust. There is no blunder 
that exceeds the blunder of reaching decisions 
on a low level. There is no unbelief more deadly 
than unbelief in and distrust of life's best hours, 
best examples, best visions. Trust the highest 
outside of yourself, trust the noblest within your- 
self. Thus, and thus only, can the three funda- 
mental realities be kept alive in your life — God, 
humanity, and your own soul. 



38 THIS MIND 

I do not pretend that all this can be seen or 
felt in its fullness at life's beginning. The full 
and complete appreciation of life's deepest expe- 
riences requires the ripening influence of years 
and use. Forty years ago I think I could have 
told another person of my own age what my 
call to the ministry meant. I could use the words 
to such a person to-day. But the call itself is 
not what it was. It was fine and inspiring then, 
when life and the world were young. The light 
of a dawning day was on it, like the radiance of 
a perfect love in its beginning. For some men, in 
some men, the high call to high service dwindles 
and shrivels as the sun rises on it. Life offers 
few things sadder than such a sight. For a man 
to live on in a calling from which the glory has 
gone or a relation from which the love has gone 
is just plain perdition. But to go forward in 
a calling or a relation which shines more and 
more is to hear the trumpets of victory above 
life's din and drudgery. fTo see your life expand- 
ing and enlarging as it advances in years is to 
walk on the eternal heights with the great and 
good, is really to know the life that is life indeed./ 

And I do not know, nor care greatly, into what 
particular form of life these principles, faith- 
fully applied, will lead you. The principles are 
the thing. A call is not limited to one form of 
service. The call is to life on this basis. If you 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— I 39 

are not called on these principles and in this 
spirit to the thing you propose or desire to do, 
keep out of that thing. When the people at one 
time found that Jesus and his disciples were not 
at a certain place the people went right away 
from that place. The people were wise. A life 
decision made, as Jesus' decision was made, with 
God as its basis, with truest service to humanity 
as its expression through life long or short, with 
one's own personality always at its best, may 
lead into one calling or another, but it can never 
lead you astray. This is the way Jesus decided. 
His life is based upon these principles. His life 
is the answer to their worth and wisdom, his life 
the proof that they can be worked even in this 
perplexed world. No one else has done it better, 
no one else has done it so well. He waits for 
a generation or score of men and women to stand 
up with him on these principles. What think 
you? Has he your vote? Will you stand on this 
level with him or on some other without him? 
He has my vote. I will go with him wherever 
he goes. 



II 



THIS MIND TOWARD LIFE'S 
DECISIONS— II 

When I read the list of topics for this short 
course of studies one day to a discerning friend 
he asked at once if there should not be one study 
on "This Mind Toward Life's Spirit." The sug- 
gestion was arresting and pertinent, but after 
carefully weighing it the conclusion was reached 
that life's spirit is not a thing that one can dis- 
cuss apart, either in the life of Jesus or the life 
of any modern man. In both, the spirit flings 
itself across, throws itself into, and imposes it- 
self upon everything else — the decisions them- 
selves, the principles on which they are based, 
the objects, the methods, the relations, the 
strength, and the tests of life. You cannot dis- 
cuss the spirit of a man in one chapter and then 
study the rest of him. The spirit of him runs 
clear through it all. It makes him or breaks 
him. And it makes or breaks him clear through 
the whole scale. 

Yet no one of these studies can go forward 
without a constant, though not necessarily fully 
expressed, assumption as to the spirit lying back 

40 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 41 

of and filling the whole subject. If we miss, or 
if we do not care for the spirit of Christ, the 
spirit in which he did everything and said every- 
thing; if we neglect or disregard the spirit in 
which we make and carry forward our life pur- 
poses, there will be nothing much in his life or 
ours that will be worth while. So while this 
does not appear as a special subject, the theme of 
one lecture by itself, it ought to and I trust will 
penetrate and warm them all. 

A few years ago the author of a widely read 
book used this sentence : "One of the weaknesses 
of the church to-day is — put bluntly — that Chris- 
tians are not making enough of Jesus Christ" 
( Glover, The Jesus of History, p. 4 ) . That sen- 
tence meets the prompt and emphatic approval 
of two groups that do not approve one another 
at all. The highly conservative group, always 
sure of its own entire orthodoxy just because it 
is conservative, sanctions the statement with 
many affirmations about Christ and much asser- 
tion of its own doctrine and view of him. The 
other group, weary of reactionary conservatism, 
accepts this statement as fully covering its own 
view, that it is Christ, and not doctrines about 
Christ, that must be emphasized. And before we 
know it, the doctrinal debate is on, the phrases 
are filling the air, shibboleths are being shouted, 
and men are being classified and tested by their 



42 THIS MIND 

acceptance or rejection of certain definitions of 
Christ, while he himself is compelled to stand to 
one side or look elsewhere for disciples and 
friends. But the truth is that the phrases "deity 
of Jesus Christ/' the "mastery of Jesus Christ,'' 
the "supremacy of Jesus Christ/' and kindred 
words are the poorest shibboleths in the world. 
They cannot be made into doctrinal shibboleths 
without destroying something deep and precious 
in them. And the personal thing lying in and 
under them cannot be lost out of any human life 
without unutterable loss. We must really "make 
enough of Jesus Christ" if we are to get out of 
the present ruck and up to the heights. And 
making enough of him requires that we see how 
he made so much of himself, and go into his 
life with him as he went into it and through it 
himself. 

We are thinking all the time of life decisions, 
not as formal acts in our lives or in his, but as 
the essential determination of what one is to do 
and be. Two or three things stand out in Jesus' 
life as the gateways through which he went to 
the fulfillment of his life's purpose, the accom- 
plishment of the objects to which his life was 
dedicated. He went into it, first, for example, 
through the gateway of perfect personal freedom. 
Many young people have expressed the opinion 
that Jesus never was up against a problem like 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 43 

theirs, that his course was marked out for him, 
that there was nothing else for him to do, noth- 
ing else he could do. Indeed, I think there is a 
very widespread idea that, while the life of Jesus 
was perfectly admirable, it was so exceptional 
in all its conditions and features as to put it 
entirely off the level of other personal lives. 
Such statements as Bushnell's, that "the char- 
acter of Jesus forbids his possible classification 
with men," such terms .as "the uniqueness of 
Jesus' character," lend themselves to creating 
this impression. In other words, we have some- 
times seemed to save the doctrine of the deity of 
Christ, which is a true doctrine, by sacrificing 
the reality of his life as at all like our own in 
essence and condition. And, of course, also we 
do infinite violence to the very deepest principle 
in Jesus' life when we do thus exalt a doctrine 
about him to a place above his own personal 
meaning for men or above himself. The doctrine 
or phrase must never conceal or obscure the per- 
son, or put him farther away. 

Why are we so afraid of the idea of freedom as 
applied to him when we are so insistent upon it 
for ourselves? If freedom is the good thing we 
really believe it to be, why should it not be 
granted without reserve to the very best person 
there is? Why sacrifice his meaning for life by 
an academic devotion to his meaning for the- 



1 



44 THIS MIND 

ology? The doctrine of the deity of Christ has 
its chief value not for the creeds, but for the men 
and women in colleges and elsewhere, the men 
and women face to face with their own lives. 
And they cannot rest their argument and demand 
for freedom on an abstraction. The final argu- 
ment for freedom is a genuinely free person mak- 
ing right use of his freedom^ The final assurance 
of freedom in ordering one's life is that Jesus 
was free in ordering his-. 

Open the record at two or three significant 
places and see how free he was and how his free- 
dom reaches into modern life wherever high- 
minded men and women are desiring to live on 
high levels. Hear him say, "I do always what is 
pleasing to Him." Now, no one can imagine 
those words spoken as though he were under 
even a divine compulsion that destroyed his own 
freedom in the matter. Every one of us feels that 
this was real freedom in him and is possible 
freedom for us. We perfectly know the differ- 
ence between the parental authority that kills 
liberty and the parental attitude that creates 
and secures it. Or take the very familiar words, 
"I am the way, the truth, the life." Suppose we 
read into these words certain additions : "I am 
the way, but you cannot walk in it. I am the 
truth, but you cannot understand it. I am the 
life, but you cannot live it." That violates all 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 45 

our sense of the spirit of Jesus, and reverses our 

entire idea of his relation to us. You cannot 

really imagine him saying that. And if he had 

said it, you would simply be compelled to be done 

with him. The only addition that those words 

will fairly bear without breaking their harmony 

with his whole life would be something like this : 

"I am the way; walk in it with me. I am the 

truth ; be free in it as I am. I am the life ; live it 

with me." No matter how poor and inadequate 

your response to that note, you know it is the 

note to which you ought to respond. Or take that 

other word, as deep and significant a statement 

as Jesus ever made about the freedom of his 

own life : "I have the power to lay it down. I 

have the power to take it again. No man taketh 

it from me. I lay it down for the sheep." You 

have the instant feeling that here speaks a free 

spirit, here speaks a man as a man ought to speak 

about his life. A person who can truly say this 

is 

"The Master of his fate, 
The Captain of his soul." 

Quite toward the end he spoke again in words 
that we may paraphrase into modern speech: 
"Do you think I have to submit to this, that I am 
carried forward by superior forces, that I am a 
slave to these conditions? I could call for help 



46 THIS MIND 

and get a dozen legions of angels. They would 
rush to my relief. My life will not be taken. 
I shall give it. I know what I am doing. I am 
free with the freedom that enables a man to make 
the grand disposal of his life." Like that we all 
have to feel. Neither fate nor predestination, 
neither circumstance nor condition can destroy 
that freedom without destroying the man him- 
self. ( A man's life decisions at last must be 
made in freedom, or they are not decisions at 
all. ■ We must go through that gateway as Jesus 
did. 

Second: So also our decisions must be made 
with single-heartedness, which is an absolutely 
essential quality in their making. In the genera- 
tion just before this, in the weariness due to the 
complexities that had grown up in modern civili- 
zation and threatened to smother life and char- 
acter, certain prophets, one in particular, widely 
proclaimed the gospel of the simple life. It was 
a word greatly needing to be spoken and widely 
quoted when spoken. The favorite text was, "The 
simplicity which is in Christ." But the popular 
mind largely missed the real meaning of both the 
text and the idea. It straightway went to cutting 
things out of life, diminishing its contents, and 
actually impoverishing life itself. ( You do not 
gain anything by reducing life to its lowest terms. 
You can make it empty and barren, shallow and 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 47 

meager, but that is not the simple life at all. 
Professor Peabody has described it in admirable 
terms which I quote : "Simplicity means single- 
ness, directness, straightforwardness, deliverance 
from the tortuous and the complex." JThe text 
should read : "The singleheartedness which is to- 
ward Christ." That was his bearing toward his 
own work. He had no division of interest. It is 
hard to tangle or defeat a person like this. The 
eye being single still guarantees that the body 
shall be full of light. t Savonarola said to his 
accusers, "My secrets have been few because my 
purposes have been great." Ambassador Jusse- 
rand said that George Washington was the "con- 
vinced partisan of the straight line." )And that 
is the only way into truth or perfect service. I 
used to hear a sentence like this : "Straight is the 
line of duty, curved is the line of beauty." The 
inference always seemed to be that the line of 
duty was ugly. But when a man makes such a 
line with his life, as Jesus did, it looks radiantly 
beautiful in this curved and winding world. 

It is very easy to wreck life by decisions which 
really divide life. You cannot serve two masters, 
even two good ones. You cannot have two coun- 
tries, two flags, two contending loyalties. Con- 
secration to money-making with benevolence as 
a by-product usually ends in benevolence getting 
the short end both of the consecration and the 



48 THIS MIND 

product. We are a queer lot, we men and women 
are. We might as well take ourselves as we are 
instead of trying to idealize ourselves. And the 
plain fact is that a complete lifetime of Christ- 
like singleheartedness toward our task is not 
easy. And yet when we see it in him it looks like 
the only thing for him or for us. 

Third : There is a third gateway into the con- 
sideration of life's decisions and that is the gate- 
way of moral integrity. Far deeper than any 
question of the particular thing you are going 
to do in the world is the question of the kind of 
person you mean to be while doing it. Every 
man faces the double problem of his task and his 
character, his work and his personality. Neither 
can be taken for granted, though unhappily both 
often are. Put in another form this problem 
would be, Does a life decision look toward and 
promise ever-improving and expanding service, 
the constant doing of better work right down 
to the end of the day, and at the same time does 
it make possible the preservation and develop- 
ment of personality in its integrity and moral 
soundness? I am not introducing here an im- 
aginary difficulty, though it is a difficulty that is 
more apparent to a man of sixty than it is to one 
of twenty. :' At the earlier age there is a kind of 
golden glow over life and its occupations. At 
that age we are crusaders and dreamers. Every- 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 49 

thing seems possible to us. No matter what we 
are planning to be, we fully intend to climb our 
hill of the Lord with clean hands and pure hearts. 
We do not propose to lift up our souls unto 
vanity or to swear deceitfully. We have no 
doubts either as to the wisdom or as to the possi- 
bility of our course. 

The world would be in sad case if youth did 
not have this spirit, if this current of high pur- 
pose and expectation were not constantly refresh- 
ing the stream that tends to grow muddy and 
heavy, to lose the sparkle and transparency of its 
earlier stages. But it would not be in harmony 
with life's facts if I did not forewarn you of the 
sure coming of moral difficulties that will 
threaten both life and character ; the coming of 
days when you will be tempted to doubt even the 
possibility of preserving your moral integrity in 
your calling, in the world as it is ; the sure com- 
ing of suggestions of such compromise of prin- 
ciple as will rot the tree of your life at its root 
and its heart. I am not speaking of the ordinary 
vulgar temptations to do wrong, the temptations 
to lie, to cheat, to take unfair advantage, or the 
gross temptations to lust or evil habits. These 
are bad enough, and in our day, the day of the 
moral backwash that follows the war, they are all 
too prevalent and common. The moral sag, the 
easy talk of changed standards, and the winking 



50 THIS MIND 

at unlovely practices make a new moral situation 
that must profoundly affect all our work for a 
better world. But I am speaking of that far 
deeper, deadlier conviction which declares that 
the spirit and principles of Jesus cannot be ap- 
plied and practiced in modern life at all ; that we 
have to take the world as it is, and that there is 
no use in attempting the impossible. Millions of 
men who are good men as men go, who do not at 
all mean to be bad men, who would scorn to tell 
a lie or steal a dollar, are living and think they 
are compelled to live in a sort of moral compro- 
mise which weakens their soul's vigor and in- 
tegrity. They would not dream of calling black 
white or white black, but in the heart of them 
they suspect that a mixed gray life is about the 
best that can be done. They would scorn to 
make immoral decisions, knowing them to be 
such, but they do make vital and fundamental 
decisions that cut the nerve of real morality and 
strike at the root of the soul's life. They quote, 
usually with a smile to indicate that they see 
its weakness, the advice of the ancient moralist 
who exhorted his disciples to "walk the straight 
and narrow path between right . and wrong." 
Nevertheless, as practical men they regard the 
advice as rather reasonable though not very 
ideal. It sounds so sensible to talk of middle-of- 
the-road morality. It would not be fair not to 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 51 

tell you that this doubt exists and is widespread, 
not among the worst men, but among many men 
who wish it otherwise, the doubt as to the pos- 
sibility of the perfectly white life in a lot of the 
occupations into which you ought to go, into 
which you desire to go, occupations having a 
really useful and essential place in the world in 
which you are to live. The doubt is not always 
formulated or expressed, but it exists. The 
world is full of Herods and John the Baptists, 
and contains lots of people who think the wise 
and safe course for life lies somewhere between 
the two. This attitude is supposed to be very 
judicious and full of plain common sense. And 
plain common sense as it exists among men is 
morally a pretty poor thing. It is morality re- 
duced to an ordinary working basis, "not too 
good for human nature's daily food." It takes 
great pride in shunning "counsels of perfection." 
If you make your life decisions on this moral 
basis or try to live your life on this basis, you 
are simply laying the foundations for moral in- 
competence, wreck and inefficiency. No skill will 
enable you to steer straight through a compro- 
mise moral channel. Here, above all places, you 
will find that you cannot serve two masters. 
Nothing can be done with or by a morally divided 
soul, a soul without truth in its inward parts. 
God has lost a thousand chances in human his- 



52 THIS MIND 

tory by reason of men who have tried to obey both 
God and men, to serve both God and mammon, to 
be straight and "sensible" at the same time. He 
really has only had one first-class, one perfect 
moral chance in that one soul, straight, sensi- 
tive and true in a generation as crooked and per- 
verse as our own, the soul that never accommo- 
dated his ideals to his surroundings. An old 
man, wise and saintly, beautiful in life and char- 
acter, told generation after generation of stu- 
dents in a certain college this fundamental 
thing: "It is always right to do right. It is 
never right to dp wrong." But that deep rule 
applies not primarily to the particular cases 
that arise in daily life. It applies especially in 
the making of the fundamental life decisions 
which will largely determine the problems that 
will arise day by day. Many a man is wrecked 
in the particular crisis because he has no general, 
controlling principle to guide and steady him. 
Silas Marner is one of the most perfect short 
stories in any literature. In it, blazing out of a 
man's bitter experience, is a sentence that shines 
like a ray of light from the throne of light: 
"Nothing is ever worth doing wrong for." J 

This thing is all mixed up with our estimate 
of values and what is worth while. And worldly 
wisdom is very sure of itself, so sure that it con- 
fidently advises youth when life's issues are at 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 53 

stake, when youth is making its life decisions. 
And the worldly wisdom that is tainted with 
moral doubt, doubt as to the possibility of a 
moral life, twisted with the spirit of moral com- 
promise, is blistered to death by one red-hot ex- 
pression spoken by the Master of life, the one 
person who knew what is possible in life. He 
had tried and had not let down, had not given 
up, had not compromised at any point He kept 
his soul as intact as his seamless robe. He knew 
what could be done because he had done it. And 
he said in never-to-be-forgotten message of speech 
and life : There is nothing worth giving your soul 
to get. There are dozens of things worth giving 
your lives for, but nothing in any world worth 
giving your soul for. And that principle stands 
here where you are making your life decisions. 
It is the unchangeable basis of the big decision. 
In it all lesser choices must be made as life goes 
on. 

In my youth I used to hear some very dreary 
and misleading preaching on the unpardonable 
sin. It proceeded upon a wholly false distinction 
between the second and third Persons in the 
Holy Trinity and left the impression that you 
could sin against the second Person and be for- 
given, but that sinning against the third Person 
was a much more serious matter, that he was not 
so easy, that he was much more sensitive to 



54 THIS MIND 

injury and wrong; or that the forgiving God 
would not stand for any sin against the third 
Person, however far he would go in case of the 
second. And he did go very far. Now, all that 
seems very far from any ethical reality or from 
having any meaning for actual life. Surely, the 
one teacher who kept closest to reality never was 
guilty of such a purely theoretical, metaphysical 
muddle as that. Any really honest person can 
see the real meaning of this if he tries. It is 
Jesus' way of saying that the deliberate reversal 
of the eternal moral order, the making morally 
black morally white, the making moral wrong 
moral right in choice and practice, in judgment 
and action, the violation of the very spirit of 
truth, righteousness, and holiness is beyond for- 
giveness ; that there is no basis of forgiveness for 
such a course in any of the righteous God's 
worlds anywhere. That was the awful thing in 
the German scholars' defense of the German 
war, that they gave their moral approval and 
sanction to the utterly immoral course of their 
country. 

I do not say nor feel called to say how far you 
can go in trying the patience, the kindness, the 
grace of Jesus Christ, and succeed with it. He 
is so patient that men ought to be ashamed to try 
his patience. I do say that you cannot, in your 
life decisions or your life practices and attitudes, 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 55 

flout the spirit of right, the spirit of holiness, and 
get away with it at all, in this world or any other. 
The ethical basis of your decisions will not bear 
trifling or stand violation. 

As I was on my way recently to an Eastern 
university where I am privileged to preach each 
year, I chanced to find the president of* the uni- 
versity on the train. We talked freely of many 
things as we went on for a few hours together. 
He is not a clergyman, nor a religious extremist, 
but as w r e talked he urged me to preach on my 
next visit to the university on this ethical basis 
of life at the time when it is taking shape in 
young life. He said in substance: "Our young 
men are confused, not as to w T hat moral standards 
there are, but as to whether there are any that 
bind them. They are divided in their minds as 
to the possibility of a right world. They are not 
sure that the wages of sin is so severe as death. 
They regard most of the talk about it as psy- 
chologically wrong. They have no keen sense of 
God and his relation to the world. They are not 
at all convinced that the men or the nations 
who go too far, who get presumptuous, will soon 
or late come straight up against him and his 
throne in the world." Much more he said, all 
to the same purpose. In making life decisions 
you must hold clearly the everlasting difference 
between right and wrong. \ And you must enter 



56 THIS MIND 

life through the proper gate. There is no other 
way. 

Finally, for to-day, as you make your decision 
you must go .through the gateway of unity. Of 
course, I do not mean unity of the churches. 
That is another and very interesting subject. 
Here we* are considering personal unity. The 
moral distractions and divisions of the world are 
very real, but internal confusion is just as real. 
Jesus made his way through the world's tangled 
paths not because those paths were clear and 
simple but because his own eye was single. The 
ways of his day were as perplexing and confused 
as the ways of ours. His contemporaries easily 
lost their way, but he kept his. We are not con- 
scious, as we study his life, of any of those ruin- 
ous contradictions so easily manifest in the lives 
of other men. I am as far as anybody from wish- 
ing to advise the impossible. The weaknesses of 
human nature are as evident to me as to anyone. 
The words of Saint Paul, that had a far nobler 
application in his case, I sadly make my own : "I 
bear about the marks' 7 of human imperfection, 
but it is not a thing to boast of or to take in a 
flippant spirit. The life of Jesus in ways which 
surely are practical and imitable looks a lot bet- 
ter than the lives which we so easily take for 
granted as being the best we can expect. I do 
not believe they are the best we have a right to 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 57 

expect. Maybe your generation will make an 
offering of personal unity, unity of character, 
that no previous generation has made. If it 
does, the world will go forward as it has not done 
in any period since Jesus Christ ascended. May- 
be out of this group will come one, ten, fifty, 
a hundred men and women who will close the 
chasms that other lives have shown. Anyhow, a 
genuine life decision for character and for occu- 
pation must take account of the unity of life, 
and it must take that account when life is young, 
or it cannot do it to the best purpose. 

You will hardly need to be told that the term 
"unity" while single in itself is not an entirely 
simple term. It represents the outcome of many 
and even diverse elements. Life's unity can be 
broken and destroyed in many ways, by the 
absence or the maladjustment of many elements. 
Or it can be broken at one or many places and its 
perfection prevented or destroyed. But in mak- 
ing your life" decision you must have in mind all 
the main features that go to make this perfect 
integrity of life. If your decision to enter a 
special calling is going to make impossible for 
you any of these fundamental unities, doubt that 
decision, turn away from that calling. For ex- 
ample, men go into certain occupations knowing 
that in them there will be, perhaps must be, a 
lifelong warfare between their private convic- 



58 THIS MIND 

tions and their public beliefs, a life that will 
compel them to act against their personal sense 
of what is right. Men have invented a philosophy 
to justify this ethical anomaly, knowing all the 
time that in the moral universe of God, in the 
world in which Jesus lives, the thing simply can- 
not be justified. You will be conforming to the 
usages of your ancestors and the practices of the 
world if you accept and follow that world-old 
philosophy, but you will be straight up against 
this word, this true, sound word, in so doing: 
"Do not follow the customs of the present age, 
but be transformed by the entire renewal of your 
minds so that you may learn by experience what 
God's will is — that will which is good and beau- 
tiful and perfect." You can take one philosophy 
and secure life's unity as Jesus did. You can 
take the other and miss it as the present age and 
past ages have done. This, again, is a thing to 
be adopted as a controlling principle governing 
individual crises and not simply to be put into 
operation on occasion as an exceptional exercise 
of virtue. You never wonder what Jesus will do 
in a given case. You know the rule of his life. 

So too you must observe and apply the prin- 
ciple of unity in your life decision where that 
principle cuts across other practices that de- 
stroy life's integrity and oneness. It is not 
necessary to discuss them at length. They are 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 59 

too often regarded simply as inconsistencies, as 
evidences of common human imperfection. At 
their worst we call them hypocrisies. But we 
would be wiser if we saw how deep their roots 
run and how they are related to the essential 
and vital integrity of personality and character. 
It is not a light and insignificant thing that there 
is such a gap between what men know and what 
they do, between what they are and what they 
say. And it is very far from being a trifling- 
thing when any man knows that his inner life is 
so nearly all wrong and in such contradiction to 
his outward life. Jesus was working on a pro- 
found knowledge of human nature when he 
talked so much and so plainly about the thoughts 
of men as distinguished from their conduct; 
about the murderers who only wish they 
could kill; the people who think with 
bitterness and anger and speak buttered, honeyed 
words which they do not mean; the mental 
adulterers who keep their minds full of pictures 
that stain and defile the very stuff of the mind, 
until the mind itself becomes darkened and in- 
capable of straight, clear thinking. You say that 
this fact in life has nothing to do with one's 
particular occupation, but has wholly to do with 
one's character in any calling, which is largely 
true. There are no callings in which one is auto- 
matically protected against these internal con- 



60 THIS MIND 

tradictions, none in which internal unity is 
secured without personal effort. Some are bet- 
ter than others. In some the weight of influences 
goes one way and in some it goes the other. I 
am saying all this that I may urge you not to 
make your decisions in ignorance or disregard 
of the need for this unity, or with a funda- 
mentally false attitude toward it, but that you 
may be urged to shun the callings that make 
internal unity virtually impossible; to choose 
the calling which calls for the deepest consis- 
tency of life and character; to commit yourself 
without reserve to the principle of unity in your 
life; and to make a world, as far as you can, 
which shall have in it ever larger numbers who 
have won freedom from the destructive internal 
strife all too well known among men. If you say 
this cannot be done, there is an easy and plain 
answer: Jesus did it. His life was not torn 
with internal moral contradictions. He was not 
prevented from making his perfect impression 
or doing his full work by any breaks between his 
internal life and its external impression. He 
perplexed people at times, but they were people 
so used to moral compromises and accommoda- 
tions that they could not understand a perfectly 
transparent life like his. We need not claim to 
be wiser or better than were the men around 
him, but such has been his influence in the cen- 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 61 

turies that whatever our own lives, he looks like 
the only real thing to us when we are thinking 
straight and are at our best. This mind that was. 
in him looks like the mind that should be in us. 

The men of my generation read, when they 
were young, Tom Brown's School Days. Thou- 
sands of them remember the words of the author 
about the teaching of Arnold, words which gave 
a new outlook to many a boy when as yet the 
day was in its morning. 

"He certainly did teach us — thank God for 
it — that we could not cut our life into slices and 
say, 'In this slice your actions are indifferent, 
and you need not trouble your heads about them 
one way or another ; but in this slice, mind what 
you are about, for they are important.' A pretty 
muddle we should have been in had we done so. 
He taught us that in this wonderful world no 
boy or man can tell which of his actions is in- 
different and which not; that by a thoughtless 
word or look we may lead astray a brother for 
whom Christ died. He taught us that life is a 
whole, made up of actions and thoughts and 
longings, great and small, noble and ignoble; 
therefore the only true wisdom for man or boy 
is to bring the whole life into obedience to Him 
whose world we live in and who has purchased 
us with his blood; and that whether we eat or 
drink, or whatsoever we do, we are to do all in 



62 THIS MIND 

his name and to his glory; in such teaching, 
faithfully, as it seems to me, following that of 
Paul of Tarsus, who was in the habit of meaning 
what he said, and who laid down this standard 
for every man and boy in his time. I think it 
lies with those who say that such teaching will 
not do for us now to show why a teacher in the 
nineteenth century is to preach a lower standard 
than one in the first/' 

In this teaching Arnold not only followed 
Saint Paul, but followed particularly that greater 
Teacher, Saint Paul's Master. Until some one 
can show some better way, surely this is the 
true way to follow. 

There is another form of unity that must have 
a word before we close. It runs straight into the 
business of life decisions and runs on into life 
itself. For our decisions are not for the moment, 
but for the ages, not for the decision's sake, but 
for the life's sake. There are two ways of look- 
ing at life. You can take the short view or the 
long view. You can do what has been called 
"short-range thinking" or you can do long-range 
thinking, but by only one way can you secure and 
preserve the vital, essential unity between the 
first of life and the last of it, or the unity that 
runs like a living, expanding stream through the 
ripening years. Life decisions cannot be changed 
every few years in their fundamental principles, 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 63 

even though life's occupations may change their 
form. Any change in the form of one's life 
must be made in obedience to the deep and abid- 
ing principles that control the whole life, or the 
unity of life is wholly broken J I have purposely 
refrained from advising you to enter any partic- 
ular calling such as preaching, teaching, medi- 
cine, or law, though even in the particular matter 
I advise with all my heart that you decide at 
the beginning for the thing you would like to 
do, the thing you ought to do, the thing the world 
will most need to have you do, through the long 
years that lie ahead of you, the half century 
that will be God's gift to many of you. Begin 
with the life you want to carry through, the one 
you can carry through. Certain occupations 
are only temporary. They are young men's tasks. 
If you choose one of them, do it on such a basis 
that you can change without wreck. You must 
be able to go in the same direction. Not so 
clearly more than forty years ago as now, but 
clearly even then, it seemed to me that the thing 
I would be wanting to do through the day and 
when the evening came was to preach the glorious 
gospel of the blessed God. It so looked then. It 
especially so looked in those golden days when 
we were hearing Phillips Brooks. More than 
ever it looks so now. But to other men, class- 
mates and contemporaries, other callings stood 



64 THIS MIND 

up like angels of light and called. And honor- 
ably, happily, usefully, they have walked with 
those other callings through "the long, long trail 
that still keeps winding down through years." 
You must reckon with the vision of the years 
rather than the vision of the hour. 

But I am anxious with unconcealed concern 
not about your particular decision, but about the 
general control of your life until the eternal 
morning breaks. I want you now to give life the 
tone, the direction, the spirit, the basis, , the 
governing purpose and aim it should carry until 
the earthly end of it. Thus you can escape the 
tragedy of a life that breaks in the middle, a life 
that finds it has gone wrong up to its noon, and 
then must turn around and painfully try to re- 
trace steps already taken, or to make as much as 
possible out of what time is left. Biography has 
many pathetic, pitiful chapters, chapters which 
record failure and calamity, chapters which 
record the misuse of high and commanding abili- 
ties, and those which tell the stories of Lucifers 
fallen from heaven, but there is nothing in biog- 
raphy sadder than the stories of men whose lives 
have had the wrong direction, the wrong tone, 
the wrong spirit through the length of it, or the 
story of men in the afternoon of life trying to 
atone for its morning. 

Many names could be mentioned as warnings. 



TOWARD LIFE'S DECISIONS— II 65 

I prefer to turn your minds as we conclude our 
study for to-day to the one perfect example of 
how it has been done, and how it should be done. 
Elsewhere and in many ways I have spoken of 
features of Jesus' life as both events and prin- 
ciples. Here as truly as anywhere that law of 
interpretation holds. What he did was an event. 
The event in his life was also a principle for the 
wide reach of human life through the years. He 
walks beside modern boys of twelve, in temples, 
in schoolyards and in homes, saying, "We must be 
about our Father's business." He goes into every 
college chapel and every student conference and 
says to the men and women : "The spirit of the 
Lord is upon us, upon you and me, for he has 
anointed us to give humanity a new chance." He 
walks beside men and women, in many occupa- 
tions, in all lands, as one of them, saying: "We 
must work the works of Him that sent us and 
finish his work, you and I. The day is long and 
the work hard, but we have put our hands to the 
plow, to make a new furrow straight across the 
world. We will not look back, will we?" He 
stands in the night beside missionaries, and mis- 
sionaries to be, beside those toilers among people 
the world does not care for, those the supercilious 
call outcasts, and he says to those friends of his : 
"There are other sheep, not of the official fold; 
we must get them and bring them, you and I. 



66 THIS MIND 

They are very foolish some of them, even for 
sheep, and some of them are out in the moun- 
tains. The night is very dark and the storm is 
very severe, but we do not flinch, do we, nor care 
how dark is the night that we must pass through, 
or how deep the waters we must cross. They will 
not know what it cost us to get them. That does 
not matter. We must not lose them. Come on." 
And they come on. And ever and again as we go 
on with him, governed by his principles, sharing 
his life, controlled by his spirit, we hear a voice 
at the river side or on the mountain top saying, 
"This is my son," and we look at him, and he 
looks back at us with the words, "He means both 
of us." Then we go on again, always with our 
faces set the same way, and one day we modestly 
say to the Father of us all, "I have finished what 
you gave me to do," and he replies : "That will 
answer. Come on up. The Great Companion is 
just inside." 

"Let this mind be in us which was also in 
Christ Jesus." 



Ill 

THIS MIND TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 

A very careful student of current English life 
declares that "one of the most pestiferous, devas- 
tating delusions that has ever taken captive the 
human mind is now rampant in the British Isles. 
It is that nothing matters very much." 

"The lightning glares and reddens 
Across the skies ; 
It seems but sunset 

To those sleeping eyes." 

This blase attitude is not wholly unknown among 
us. It is rather easily explained as the normal 
reaction from the days when we were over- 
wrought. But whoever takes this attitude just 
now is guilty of "short-range thinking." , Indiffer- 
ence to life's long objects in a day of universal 
rebuilding is a crime against personality, against 
the present and future of mankind, against that 
one Person whose concerns were never more 
acute than at this hour in the world's develop- 
ment. ) Yet when one, even partially aware of 
Jesus' 7 interest in the world, speaks to youth with 
an extra warmth or passion he is likely not to 
be understood. And some will wonder why he 

67 



68 THIS MIND 

is so earnest, and others regard him as over- 
wrought and overheated. Men easily responded 
to the most intense speech four and five years 
ago, but now the cooling process has reached 
down to the very depths. I cannot think, how- 
ever, that the cooling process or the indifferent 
spirit has got hold of Jesus. To him surely 
things matter very much. 

And we must stand with him as we make up 
our minds, which is another, older way of saying 
as we make our life decisions as to life's objects. 
There are no other principles and there is no 
other personal presence than his in this supreme 
hour. Fortunately, he belongs to no particular 
calling. He was the perfect preacher, but was 
not a clergyman, the greatest teacher, but not a 
professor, the perfect physician, but not a doctor. 
He belongs equally to men in all good occupa- 
tions. And as you stand beside him the whole 
idea of a special call to certain forms of life 
seems not quite so sure as it used to. He seems 
interested in whatever men can do or be. Time 
was when the idea of a special call to the minis- 
try or missionary service pretty nearly seemed to 
exhaust God's interest in men's lifework, as 
though he had to do with men going into those 
callings and went in with them, but if men and 
women went into any other callings they went on 
their own responsibility, without his having any- 



TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 69 

thing special to do with it. And that had an- 
other element, namely, that only certain men and 
women, those who were planning to do these 
things, were at all obliged to refer their decisions 
to or test the objects of their lives by the high 
principles and character of Jesus ; that men look- 
ing toward the ministry had to, but men look- 
ing toward law did not need to. You can see 
where this leads when once it is stated. Of 
course it was a part of that wretched old divi- 
sion between the sacred and the secular, which 
perhaps ought not to be too severely criticized. 
It was something, after all, to have rescued one 
or two occupations and small parts of life from 
the total, universal secularizing process. Against 
it have come two reactions, one that all callings 
are equally secular, the other that all are equally 
holy. The true reaction is that those occupations 
and callings are holy which men and women 
enter and live in on the principles and in the 
fellowship of Jesus. That extends the area of 
the sacred until it covers a lot of things like 
Sam Higginbotham's farms and the work of 
thousands besides. The sacred area in any true 
view of it is not hard to get into by one making 
a life decision. It takes an act of force and 
violence to get out of it when one is deciding 
what he really sets before him as a life object. It 
surrounds us like light and atmosphere which 



70 THIS MIND 

we must see and breathe unless we plunge into 
something else. 

Many young people of college age feel a kind 
of break between their own lives and the life 
of Jesus due to the absence of any full record 
of what he was doing when he was their age. He 
appears in a significant way when he is a boy of 
twelve, then disappears almost completely until 
he is thirty. All that lies between is left by both 
literature and art to silence and imagination. 
There is only that one wonderful sentence : "He 
grew in wisdom and stature." The boy was be- 
coming a man. The college man naturally feels 
that he is beyond the experience and feeling of 
the boy of twelve. By precisely the same token 
he feels that he has not quite reached the de- 
velopment of this full-bearded man of thirty who 
comes to be baptized. Our college man expects 
that at thirty he will be in full tide in his early 
career and not just then publicly entering it. He 
is eight years older than the Boy in the temple 
and ten years younger than the Man at the 
Jordan. Of course, if the Gospels had chiefly a 
biographical interest in Jesus, this gap would 
be fatal. We would not care for a life of Phillips 
Brooks that said nothing at all of his Harvard 
years. 

Art has followed the example of literature. 
The stuff in the Apocryphal Gospels has not 



TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 71 

given encouragement to go beyond the real Gos- 
pels. So that in art there is almost nothing 
after Hofmann's beautiful picture of "Jesus and 
the Doctors," until the bearded man appears in 
his full activity, in the serious business of his 
life. There is, to be sure, one picture of the 
youth standing in the door of the carpenter shop, 
with outstretched arms, his shadow making the 
figure of a cross behind him. But for the men 
and women of college age there are no details of 
the life of Jesus at the same age that are at all 
definite. 

Is the loss a dead and irreparable loss? I can- 
not quite think so. The silent, growing years are 
not so unknown as we may think. We are per- 
haps as well off in the materials for understand- 
ing his personality as if we had more details. We 
might easily get lost in the details. After all, 
it is the adult life of a. person that has meaning 
for us. The Harvard days of Brooks, the Cam- 
bridge days of Charles Kingsley, and the Yale 
years of Bushnell interest us because of what 
those men became. And we interpret their per- 
sonalities in the light of the years that followed 
thirty. It is fascinating for youth, youth that 
has passed childhood and not yet reached full 
manhood or womanhood, to imagine what was 
going on in the mind and life of Jesus and to 
compare it as they think it out with what is 



72 THIS MIND 

going on in themselves. I suspect that it is more 
possible for each of us to relate ourselves to 
him than it would be if we had the details that 
are lacking. We saw him go into the silent years, 
the years that would carry him through our col- 
lege period; we heard him use the words, "I 
must be about my Father's business/' as he passed 
into the quiet and work and growth at Nazareth. 
We see him come out at thirty, making his public 
confession and consecration of himself in the bap- 
tism. We see that his face, a man's face now, is 
set in the same direction that it held when a boy ; 
his clear eyes are looking the same way they 
did look; his words sound almost as if he had 
begun with the sentence: "As I was saying, I 
must be about my Father's business." And our 
hearts, our eighteen-year-old hearts, our twenty- 
year-old hearts, are thrilled with the feeling, 
the assurance that he kept a straight path be- 
tween boyhood's simple faith and manhood's full 
consecration; that his feet did not get tangled 
in the tortuous paths of youth where so many of 
us lose the way; that for him there will be no 
bitter years in which he will remember how he 
forgot what he had been and what he was going 
to be; that he will have nothing to undo or ex- 
plain ; that he is ready when the hour strikes to 
go forward into his life program. Blessed is 
that youth, that college youth who makes the 



TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 73 

straight way in this company in this fashion 
between the simple early years and the vital years 
of the perfect labor to which they go. Blessed 
also that youth who, having got confused, sees 
in the light of Jesus' face the way back into the 
path that does not need and will never need to 
change direction. Maybe we shall see again 
how direct is the line for the boy in the grades, 
through high school and college, and all other 
preparation to the objects of life. Maybe the 
mind that was in him in this matter will be in 
others. It is the hope of a new and better world. 
When one begins to study the objects of Jesus 
as they affected his life decision and must affect 
ours, if we are to share his life and objects, one 
is at once impressed with the wealth of what he 
proposed to do. A half dozen or more capital 
sentences can be found, all apparently on the 
same level of significance, all equally descriptive 
of his mission. I preached my own first little ser- 
mon more than forty years ago from the text 
"The Son of man is come to seek and to save that 
which is lost," and the subject of the sermon was 
"The Mission of Jesus." But that same subject 
could have been based upon other texts just as 
clearly as upon that one. For example : "I am 
come that they might have life." Or the ringing 
declaration to Pilate: "To this end was I born, 
and for this purpose I came into the world, to 



74 THIS MIND 

bear witness to the truth." You see that no one 
sentence of his fully covers what he proposed to 
do. One takes the first of those sentences just 
quoted and becomes an evangelist, another takes 
the second and becomes a general benefactor, an- 
other takes the third and becomes a Christian 
teacher. We make a great mistake in our ever- 
lasting efforts to summarize everything. The 
objects of the largest, most truly first-class lives 
do not admit of the nutshell treatment. The 
really abundant life does not readily lend itself 
to characterization by epigram. Those persons, 
those churches, those states which can define 
their whole object or even their supreme object 
in a single sentence are not worth most to the 
world. They have the keenest edge, bnt the keen 
edge is a narrow edge, and life's highest quality 
is neither keenness nor narrowness. A creed 
with a single doctrine, like a platform with a 
single plank, is very appealing to single-track 
minds, but neither makes adequate answer to 
life's manifold needs, though they are often 
accompanied by a zeal in their behalf that is not 
given to richer creeds and better platforms. But 
if there is any one lesson in religious history, 
it is that "the whole stress of religion should 
never be laid upon one part of it." The glorious 
gospel of the blessed God is as rich as the nature 
of God himself and ample for every real neces- 



TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 75 

sity of all human life. Let us, therefore, gladly 
abandon the effort to state life's objects in an 
epigram or rest their whole weight on a single 
sentence. 

I suspect that at this point we meet a prin- 
ciple that is not usually recognized in connection 
with life decisions. I do not remember ever to 
have seen it discussed and I certainly have never 
treated it myself even through years of speaking 
on this subject. And I am rather ashamed to 
have overlooked what really seems like some- 
thing altogether worth while and what may pos- 
sibly be a commonplace to the minds of other 
men. The principle is that there is a real and 
profound difference between the decision for a 
particular occupation and the determination of 
life's large objects which must be worked out in 
every true occupation. We are disposed to be 
satisfied with what is really the minor decision, 
whereas the really great concern lies far beyond 
it. The particular calling or occupation is im- 
portant as any instrument with which a man 
does his work is important, but the occupation 
is at its best only the agency, the means, the 
instrument with which a man carries out in the 
world the large or small, the high or low, the 
good or bad, the holy or unholy objects and pur- 
poses of his life. Everything depends upon what 
those controlling purposes are. They reach 



76 THIS MIND 

through all the activities and through all the 
years of any man's life. 

Because this matter is so significant it will be 
worth our while to go into it somewhat further. 
Let us suppose that any student here believes 
himself to be called to the ministry, called by all 
those forces that lie in every true call, called 
as certainly by God himself as Saint Paul was 
called to be an apostle. And let us suppose that 
such student, perhaps against his own will, in 
utter change of all the plans he had made and 
prefers, with genuine distrust of himself as he 
faces what he regards as a calling far above 
him, at last obeys this call in the spirit of obe- 
dience and consecration that links him witL 
prophet and apostle. He sees the heavenly vision 
and will not be disobedient to it. It makes the 
heart beat fast to witness that event in any 
youth's life, especially if one remembers a like 
event in his own. Really it is no wonder that it 
makes such a deep impression upon the youth 
himself and upon his friends. It stands toward 
his lifework as conversion does toward the Chris- 
tian life that follows. Going through that won- 
derful gate of call or conversion is so glorious 
an experience that it often seems to be the climax 
and high point both of ministry and Christian 
life. Men go on through life telling the story 
of their "call" or their conversion, ever telling 



TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 77 

it as their experience. They repeat all the stir- 
ring details, the time, the place, the conditions. 
They go through the gate over and over again, 
or warm themselves year after year in the fire 
through which they came into ministry or Chris- 
tian life. Dramatically converted men go 
through life telling the dramatic story of their 
conversion, often as though this which should 
be the beginning of a Christian life were the 
whole of it. And dramatically called preachers 
never weary themselves reciting the thrilling 
story of their call, a call which grows in the tell- 
ing as good stories always do, as though the call 
to the ministry constituted the ministry itself. 
All this has been both a strength and a weakness 
in the lives of many in our own and other 
churches, a strength in the clearness and power 
of conversion and call, a weakness in the ever- 
lasting failure to place that experience as only 
the entrance to an ever-enriching life and an ever- 
deepening service in the ministry. For, after all 
is said, the real question for any best youth is 
not whether he is called to the ministry or 
whether he obeys that call; the real question is 
what he proposes to do, to live for, to labor for, 
to die for in that ministry. What does he set 
before him as its objects through the years of his 
youth, his manhood, and his age? What are the 
objects which he must win or fail, which he must 



78 THIS MIND 

try to achieve or die? What rich, living truth 
will he use and use to set men free? What will 
he do to recover lost sheep or recall lost sons? 
What Christlike ministry of consolation will he 
show toward the world of awful sorrow that 
breaks the hearts of men? What steadying, guid- 
ing, encouraging, inspiring relation will he sus- 
tain to childhood and youth even in its trying 
years? What course will he take through the 
tangled moral evils of the town he lives in, and 
the world of his day? In a word,' again, what 
will be the objects of his ministry — the objects 
that lift him in his youth, that call him like a 
trumpet in the heat of life's noon, that make his 
sky to shine as he goes toward life's evening? 
What are the objects that he will set before him 
as that other Minister did, with such clearness 
that he can endure the cross, the cross of all the 
things a town can do to him, and despise the 
shame, the shame of poverty and opposition and 
even defeat, as long as his objects are like his 
Master's? Do you see? The objects justify the 
call, the objects sanctify the decision. Really 
nothing else does. 

I pass by missions and teaching and medicine 
because, in a sense, they are easy. The relation 
between the decision to enter any of them, and 
the objects that fairly inhere in each of them, any 
one can see. Let us assume that this is clear, 



TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 79 

and go on to consider two or three other callings 
which are not thought to be so easy, which are 
not thought or spoken of as "callings" at all. And 
yet many of you will go into one or the other 
of them. Must you in so doing leave all conse- 
cration behind? Must you in so doing separate 
yourself in spirit from your fellow student who 
heads toward ministry or missionary service? 
Must you turn your back upon the gleam which 
they follow? Must you be disobedient to the vi- 
sion which they obey ? Worst of all, must you miss 
the companionship which they have? Are you 
barred from saying, "Master, I will go along 
with you wherever you go"? Does the life 
journey with him lead only to the pulpit or the 
foreign field? The scribe said he would go with 
the Master. Was the rich young ruler prevented 
by anything except his selfishness from saying it 
with equal loyalty? 

Let us look, then, at what we call business. 
Let that term have its largest meaning. Let it 
include all that great big enterprise that engages 
and occupies such multitudes of great big men; 
that enterprise that runs into economics, com- 
merce, industry, comfort, welfare, and activity 
that make up such a tremendous portion of the 
life of the world. Many of you will make your 
life decision for business. We need not try to 
conceal that fact from ourselves. Must we say 



80 THIS MIND 

to all those who do make that decision that they 
can have no fellowship with the Great Compan- 
ion in their occupation? Has the door to busi- 
ness written over it those utterly despairing 
words, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here"? 
Must one facing that way face entirely away 
from all spiritual ideals, all those principles 
that we have been considering, those principles 
that seemed necessary if we would save our 
souls? Or does our distinction between life deci- 
sions and life objects come to our relief at this 
point? Let us see. 

We need be under no illusions as to the spirit 
of business, take it by and large. Neither big 
business nor small business is conducted with 
primary reference to the law of love. We need 
not charge it with dishonesty at all, but we do 
it no injustice in declaring that the governing 
law, the ruling principle of trade in all its forms 
is the law of gain and the principle of profits. 
The fruit of the spirit of modern business is 
assuredly not "love, joy, peace, patience, kind- 
ness, benevolence, good faith, meekness, self- 
restraint." The business world, the men of busi- 
ness themselves being the judges, is not a friend 
of grace, to help anyone on to God. The spirit of 
business is not the spirit of Christ as business 
goes on in the present age. It never has been 
in any age. No one can read the Gospels with- 



TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 81 

out feeling his own intense anxiety for people 
who get involved in the struggle for wealth, or 
even the absorption in material things at all. 
Words that would be denounced as extreme if 
spoken by any country pastor were spoken over 
and over again by him, seriously, thoughtfully, 
faithfully. He does not say that men in business 
cannot be good men, but he evidently thinks that 
special grace is needed for all such men. 

And I think you will find all too many men 
who think they .cannot succeed in the various 
kinds of business if they apply the principles 4 of 
Jesus to their business and who fix up some sort 
of compromise that will enable them to do as well 
as they can. They want to be Christians, they 
do not want to be cranks, so they become worldly- 
wise and avoid being righteous overmuch. Also 
you will hear a lot of men announcing their life 
decisions with business in view of these words : 
"God wants some men to make money for him, 
and I think I can be one of them." For forty 
years and more I have been hearing college men 
say that, and have been watching the outcome of 
it in scores and hundreds of lives. It is not a 
very encouraging experience. In the long run 
the emphasis has mostly shifted, and men have 
made "money" in capitals, "for God" in small 
type. They get the bulk of the money they make, 
leaving for God only diminishing returns. Some- 



82 THIS MIND 

times they drug their souls by quoting Jacob 
and talking of the tithe that is the Lord's, as if 
the rest, the most, belonged to them. Probably 
the worst bookkeeping in the world is the book- 
keeping with God on the part of men who set 
out to make money for him. I am not mincing 
words or putting this on an easy basis for you. 
You will go into business, lots of you, and I am 
trying to tell you how the Master looks on what 
it involves, knowing full well that when the com- 
mercial spirit gets controlling hold of any man 
in 'ministry or anywhere else it ruins him in the 
soul of him. 

Is the case then absolutely hopeless, as it looks 
to be? I do not think so. I cannot let the vast 
majority of men go into an occupation without 
trying to show them how they can do it and 
yet keep step with the Master of all life. We 
must have recourse here to the deep distinction 
between our occupations and our objects. If 
the object is to make money, the man is gone. 
If the object is simply to make an ever better 
living, better as judged merely by physical and 
un-Christlike tests, then the man is gone. If 
the object works out so that God always gets the 
small end, then the thing is wrong. But if in 
the everlasting struggle between the spirit of 
the age and the spirit of the Master the latter 
always wins; if God does always get the long 



TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 83 

end both of the life and its outcome ; if this stand- 
ard counts for more and more and the stand- 
ards of the world for less and less; if the objects 
of Christ control with ever-growing power your 
own objects; if mammon is ever your servant and 
Christ ever your Master ; if you grow ever more 
certain that it is far easier to make your way 
against a crooked generation than it is to mock 
or deceive a perfectly straightforward God, then 
you can go into business with hope, courage, and 
a high heart. Only you must resolve to do it 
this way even though you are the only one. In 
this you cannot condition what you do upon 
whether others will do it this way. That would 
be easy. But you must do it this way even if 
no man stands with you. For then, and then only, 
will Jesus Christ stand by you. If you go into 
business as a vocation you must go in with the 
mind that was in him toward the objects of your 
business life. The one tragic overwhelming 
failure and bankruptcy in that calling is the 
failure to have his mind, and the bankruptcy 
which follows. For that bankruptcy is moral 
and personal. If it is impossible to do business 
successfully on Christ's principles, it is even 
more impossible to live successfully on any other 
principles than his. 

Or take the editorial calling. Many of you 
look ahead to some sort of relation to the periodi- 



84 THIS MIND 

cal press. Some hope to write for magazines or 
to edit one of them. Some plan to be correspond- 
ents, reporters, and finally editors of daily news- 
papers. Hardly any occupation open to Christian 
scholars offers finer opportunity for Christian 
service than the occupation of a Christian writer. 
Never did the printed page, especially the daily 
or magazine page, reach so far. Never was it 
more important to have journalism in all its 
reaches and ranges sanctified by consecration 
and purpose, made in the deepest sense a calling 
rather than a profession or occupation. And it 
has never been harder than it will be in your 
lifetime, the time when you are working out your 
life decisions in life service, to make a calling of 
it. Journalism of all sorts has been incrusted, as 
other professions have been, by the spirit of com- 
mercialism and conformity. Men write what will 
sell, what editors and readers will buy. Men 
print what they think the public wants. Or 
journalism reflects and photographs life and thus 
creates more of the thing it portrays. It is repor- 
torial rather than creative and constructive. 
Here, then,' is an opportunity which can only be 
hinted at, not described in these brief limits. 
Some of you have been called by journalism. 
You cannot fulfill your calling by taking your 
keynote from the counting room, the party plat- 
form, or the sentiment round about you. You 



TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 85 

cannot be a minister of Christ in that high call- 
ing unless you bring the mind of Christ to that 
calling. It was important beyond words that the 
writers of the Old and New Testaments should 
have been moved, guided, helped by the Holy 
Spirit. They had such inspiration for their writ- 
ing as they needed to interpret the mind, the 
purpose, the ways and the love of God to the 
world. What they wrote remains the world's 
most precious and useful literature. I have more 
than once tried to prove that they were truly 
inspired by the Holy Spirit. I have been deeply 
interested in the inspiration of the prophets, 
evangelists, and apostles. But to-day I am also 
greatly concerned about what Henry Drummond 
called "the contemporary activities of the Holy 
Spirit'' among modern men and women who 
write. Will you, facing that career, face it in 
this light? Will you set before yourself a crea- 
tive, constructive journalistic ideal and life, or 
will you simply content yourself with being a 
reflector, photographer or reporter of the life 
about you? Your answer will determine whether 
journalism is to be an occupation or a calling 
in your hands. What has been done by such 
inspired Scripture or writing as we have leads 
me to long that a whole generation of writing 
men and women may write what may in our 
modern life be profitable for teaching, "for re- 



86 THIS MIND 

proof, for correction, for instruction in righteous- 
ness/' On this basis journalism will come back 
to its own and to its throne, and journalists will 
take their place as the called of God for a service 
no one else can perform. 

One other occupation that is regarded as diffi- 
cult when a Christian student is making his life 
decision is the profession of a lawyer. After an 
address to the Student Conference at Lake 
Geneva last summer, one of the best of the men 
on the grounds expressed real regret that no 
word had been said by me to help the sincere, 
earnest men who were there looking toward law 
as a lifework. He pointed out that they are 
earnest men, men who want to serve Christ in 
their lives, men who want to do it in the legal pro- 
fession, but are partly made to feel that in that 
profession they cannot. After what he said I 
too regretted my omissions, though that is more 
common with me than with my audiences. 

I need not raise again the questions that were 
raised in introducing the paragraphs on business 
as a calling, though many of them and many 
more would apply here. They are taken for 
granted as confronting us now as they did then. 
And in addition there are some rather discourag- 
ing words about lawyers in a very significant 
place. In the New Testament the lawyer does 
not appear to very good advantage. And in the 



TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 87 

common opinion of the profession itself and that 
of the world concerning the profession it is not 
regarded as one of the eminently Christian pro- 
fessions as such, though many eminent Chris- 
tians adorn and honor the profession by their 
membership in it. The real question, however, 
is not whether a man can be a successful lawyer 
and still be a Christian. That question is 
answered by the lives and characters of many 
men who have shown that this can be done. The 
real question for men at the age when they are 
seriously making their life decisions is whether 
they can make their decision with the consecra- 
tion that marks the Master and on the principles 
upon which he based his own life. They want 
to become lawyers, and they do not want to 
break with Jesus. (Of course, this applies to 
those to whom it applies, and not at all to those 
who do not care for him, who make all their 
plans without reference to him. ) Can they make 
this decision at the altar, or when they are 
remembering Jesus Christ in the holy commun- 
ion, or when they are looking him in the face, 
or facing a lifetime which may be spent with or 
without him? Of course, if they cannot, then 
there is but one thing to do. They must turn 
their backs upon the profession they desire for 
the sake of their loyalty to the Master whom they 
adore. 



88 THIS MIND 

But here I think we must have recourse to 
three considerations. First: The law is not all 
on the same level. There are kinds of lawyers 
that no decent, earnest man can be. There are 
low conceptions of the profession and low prac- 
tices in it which cannot be chosen by any youth 
who looks ahead to a noble life. On the other 
hand, there are lofty, holy ideals of the profes- 
sion sacredly held and honored by sincere men, 
who in their calling and by their calling preserve 
their own integrity unsullied, like the spotless 
ermine, and through the years hold society to 
obedience to law, to respect for truth and confi- 
dence in justice. Men of this sort stand before 
the youth of every college as examples of the 
better way. 

Second: The distinction between life's deci- 
sions and life's objects holds here, holds here 
perhaps in a special measure. The deeper ques- 
tion of one's final purpose must be answered. 
Does that purpose walk in even step with the 
purpose of the good and great of all the ages? 
Does it go steadily, unswervingly, at any cost 
toward making on this earth, among men and 
nations a true republic or kingdom of law, of 
justice, of righteousness, of truth and fairness 
between men, of freedom from oppression and 
legalized wrong, of security for the weak, the 
safety of society and the only liberty there is, 



TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 89 

liberty under law? If the decision to go into 
law cannot bear these tests as to its objects, it 
cannot be made in Christ's name. And that is 
final. No man can deliberately head toward the 
low, mean practices of the law and do it in 
Christ's name or on his abiding principles. 

Third : I am including in the words "law as a 
profession" all that large and valuable public 
service which really can only be fully and per- 
fectly performed by the aid of men of legal 
training. And I declare my conviction that men 
with the right legal training and the right spirit 
with it, men who are not slaves to legal petti- 
ness and technical formalities, men who share 
Christ's objects in the world and have his devo- 
tion to those objects, have an opportunity for 
Christian service to-day that such men have not 
had in any Christian century. They have the 
chance to redeem the profession from the work 
and reputation of their forebears in the New 
Testament. In that day a certain lawyer tried 
to trap Jesus Christ and to puzzle him by ques- 
tions. In this day the right sort of lawyer has 
a glorious chance to help Jesus Christ make 
straight the legal paths in which men and nations 
can walk, as they go not toward a League of 
Nations, but toward the Kingdom which is love, 
joy, and truth, the Kingdom of holiness on this 
poor old earth of ours. If you are going in like 



90 THIS MIND 

this, with this object governing and controlling 
• you, you may look just ahead or just at your 
side for the figure with the seamless robe and 
sandaled feet. And if you see him, strike step 
with him and go on. ) 

One day a group of bishops called upon the 
President of the United States, as their prede- 
cessors had done for more than a century, to 
assure the President of their loyalty to him and 
prayers for him. One of them — now in the skies 
— read a brief address in which he referred to 
himself and his colleagues as ministers of reli- 
gion ordained to establish righteousness, peace, 
and goodness among men. He had barely fin- 
ished when the President, with eyes gleaming 
behind his glasses, teeth flashing in the light 
that shone into his face, with high, cracking voice 
almost furiously said: "I also am a minister of 
religion. I too have taken the vows of a holy 
service in the world. I also have been ordained 
to establish righteousness and truth, and to make 
a better world for humanity. God help me. I 
will keep my vow and fulfill my ministry among 
men." 

One other day, not long ago, one of those same 
bishops sat in the gallery of a noble building in 
the nation's capital and saw the Secretary of 
State surrounded by men of the great nations 
working on the problem of a world without war, 



TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 91 

working with all their human skill, all their legal 
training, and that Secretary at least with all his 
Christian consecration. And as that bishop 
watched those men and thought of the world 
meaning of their task, thought of the Master's 
interest in what they were doing, the ordaining 
mood came upon him as at an Annual Confer- 
ence when men are set apart for the ministry. 
He wanted to lay hands upon the heads of them 
and say : "The Lord pour upon thee the Holy 
Spirit for the office and work of an international 
statesman now committed unto thee by the 
authority of Christ. And be thou a faithful dis- 
penser of the truth of God and the ordinances 
of peace and righteousness in the name of the 
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." 

Are you prepared to be ordained to such 
objects as you make your life decision, with the 
law as your choice? If you are, go ahead. If 
not, do not go any farther that way. 

Finally, the objects of a man's life must be seen 
in the light of three or four steady flames. 
Already we have seen that the purposes of a 
rich, full life are too large to be stated in a 
single sentence or seen in a single act. Skeleton 
keys do not work in this kind of personality. 
You see what a man is going to be, or when his 
life is fully under way you see what his objects 
are, or when it is over you get the full picture 



92 THIS MIND 

of what it was, not in the light of one verbal 
flash, however brilliant. If it is really worth 
understanding, it must be studied in its total im- 
pression, the impression inevitably made by four 
or five features. For example, attention has 
already been called to three or four sentences, 
each one sounding like a statement of the mission 
of Jesus. As between those sentences taken by 
themselves, apart from everything else, one might 
readily get confused as to the real object of the 
Master. You have to unite them, relate them to 
one another, and to all the rest of his sayings in 
order to get their full meaning. And, indeed, 
that just about says what I am trying to say. 
You get your final, complete knowledge of any 
real man's objects from his total output of seri- 
ous utterance, from first to last. The impression 
of Jesus' objects is not so clear and sharp as if he 
had said just one specific, single thing. Small 
minds will not get so much out of it, so much 
that is handy for debate or for use as shibboleths ; 
it will not be so easy to get a catchy sentence 
upon which to build a catchy career or a petty 
denomination, as if they could seize a single 
sentence and ignore all the rest. But you men 
and women ought to thank your God that you can 
escape this narrowing, dwarfing conception, and 
see the objects of Jesus in the sum total of what 
he said. It is not so sharp and definite, not so 



TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 93 

mathematically precise, but it has a personal 
wealth and fullness, a glory of abundance and a 
splendor of universality and an appeal to the 
largest life in it that make two things forever 
sure. These words, these total words, are spirit 
and life. And these words shall not pass away. 
They will, as Dean Stanley said, pass into litera- 
ture and into life, but they will not pass away. 

You get the same impression in the same way 
by a study of what he did. He never created the 
impression that what he was saying or doing at 
any given moment was unimportant and might 
be ignored. And he never created the impression 
that the individual thing was the only thing 
he was interested in. Yet here, again, superficial 
minds can easily mislead themselves by the par- 
tial view and lay the whole stress of his activity 
upon a single act. And if you press that far 
enough, you can base your own mission upon 
washing men's feet, or walking on the water, or 
riding on a young donkey, or cursing barren fig 
trees, or driving evil spirits into pigs. Every one 
of these things Jesus did. But any man would 
be a foolish man who should seize any one of 
them or any other single act of his life as though 
it fully expressed the object of his life. Here, 
as in the case of his utterance, you have to inter- 
pret the objects of his life by the grand total of 
his activity, the full output of his deeds. What 



94 THIS MIND 

he did through his whole wonderful life — the 
miracles he performed, the common good he went 
about doing, the countless deeds of mercy, kind- 
ness, usefulness, and righteousness, recorded 
only in part — shows what he meant to do, what 
the objects of his life were. There are words of 
his that you can hardly read if you think of 
them in this light. In the very greatest night of 
history you hear him saying to his Father these 
two sentences: "The truths which thou didst 
teach me, I have taught them." "I have done 
perfectly the work thou didst give me to do." 
In speech and deed, in total speech and total 
deed, he revealed and worked out the objects of 
his life. 

Mr. Gladstone had religion as the very basis 
of his life. He wanted to enter the ministry. 
He did go to Parliament. But the mere choice of 
a profession could make no difference in the 
ground tone of his thought and life (Russell, 
Life of Gladstone). 

You see it also in Jesus' total plan for all the 
large variety of people that he touched, labored 
for, worked with and worked upon. This rela- 
tion to people as bearing upon life's decisions 
and revealing life's objects is so full of meaning 
that it must be made the subject of an entire 
study before we have done. At the risk of antici- 
pating now and repeating later, let me say that 



TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 95 

here again the test does not lie in what he did or 
proposed to do with one person any more than 
it did in one truth or one deed. His relation to 
Peter was not the only relation he sustained any 
more than the new birth was the only truth he 
taught or healing lepers the only thing he did. 
In making his life decision and in making yours, 
the total relation to humanity is the vital thing. 
/ The object of life is tested by what one proposes 
to do through his whole life for mankind as a 
whole. All personal life must get its benefit. 

The object of life as affecting and illuminating 
life decisions can be seen also in what one earn- 
estly, steadily, and passionately prays for. 
Hardly anything more clearly reveals a man's 
real purposes than the temper and tone of his 
prayers. It is amazing to observe that uncon- 
sciously, perhaps unintentionally, prayers are 
usually selfish. You can pretty nearly tell what 
a person is or is going to be by hearing, particu- 
larly by overhearing, what he most earnestly asks 
God to do. fFor real prayer is much more than 
simply a pious wish piously uttered. At its best 
it is a man's highest and deepest desire laid down 
before the Almighty, all-wise, all-understanding 
God. It is a real desire put up to the Person who 
may grant it or bring it to pass. )l doubt if any 
more critically important words were ever 
spoken to men than these : "Ask what you will." 



96 THIS MIND 

If you had one wish, one wish for all the world 
to know, one wish for God to grant, not a secret 
wish known only to your own soul, not a wish 
to end in being wished, but one wish as the full 
desire of your life, one wish to be realized in the 
w r orld, one wish to have your name attached to 
through the centuries, what would it be? Do 
not answer in a hurry. Do not be superficial and 
trifling about it. Keep steady while you look it 
over and look it through. This is not an imagi- 
nary or hypothetical suggestion. You have one 
such wish. Whatever it is determines the real 
object of your life and the real meaning of your 
life decision. He had such a wish. You have it. 
It takes many forms and reaches into many 
areas, but the thing you genuinely ask God for 
is the thing that in the long run you want done 
in your life. 

Of course all this finds chief expression in 
what a man lives for and, if he has the oppor- 
tunity, dies for. The objects of his life, the 
objects which govern his life decisions, really 
determine all the ends he aims at. For them he 
spends his days and nights. For them he toils 
and suffers and sacrifices. For them at last he 
cheerfully lays life down and counts the end 
worth the price. And it is good that in the world 
where you are to spend your years there are so 
many things worth living for and worth dying 



TOWARD LIFE'S OBJECTS 97 

for. Not everything that men do will bear so 
much weight as the weight of a life and a death. 
A lot of things are not worth any such price, but 
if you have come thus far on the principles we 
have had before us, and especially in the company 
of that other Person, you will not care for those 
unworthy things now. He is worthy; the objects 
of his life and death justify what he gave for 
them. There is a glorious chance to complete 
his work, even to make up what was lacking in 
his sufferings. He is still in it as in the days 
long gone. I know nothing better for you men 
and women than to get into it with him for life 
or for death. 



IV . 

THIS MIND TOWAED THE STRENGTH OF 
LIFE 

It surely is not necessary to say again that a 
life decision is only the beginning of a lifework. 
David Livingstone used to say, "The end of the 
exploration is the beginning of the enterprise/' 
which we may paraphrase to read, "The end of 
the decision is the beginning of everything." 
You make the decision some day in a swift, vital 
hour, but you do not have it over with in an hour. 
The years pack themselves into the moments and 
the years make the moments immortal. 

"Heard are the voices, 
Heard are the sages, 
The worlds and the ages. 
Choose well; your choice is 
Brief and yet endless." 

Because of the long reach of a life decision, be- 
cause it must be tested by the logic and expe- 
rience of the years rather than the logic and 
emotion of the hours, it is necessary at this 
point to utter two serious cautions. First, do 
not go into a calling for life that will wear out 

98 



TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 99 

in a few years. Your calling ought to last your 
lifetime. It is a pitiful thing to grow tired of 
your vocation while the day is yet young, to 
"catch up with your horizon'- before you have 
reached the middle of your journey. Second, 
do not go into a great calling on a small motive, 
or a narrow basis. Especially do not, for small 
reasons, just drift into any high occupation for 
the purpose of trying it to see how you will like 
it. Men who try the ministry to see whether they 
will like it usually end by trying the churches 
more sorely. Men who try teaching or medicine 
or law saying: "If I do not like it, I will try 
something else," are trials themselves from the 
start. They are off the center. Making life deci- 
sions on the basis of personal liking or disliking 
is one of the worst sorts of egotism. Life deci- 
sions should never be made on an egocentric 
basis. 

Life decisions should be made on such prin- 
ciples and for such reasons as will secure a sense 
of strength and steadiness, as will take the fret 
and uncertainty out of a man. He need not 
have the sense of personal strength — that would 
be vanity. He must have the sense of strength 
of calling — that is power. You may well be 
modest and distrustful of yourself, but restless- 
ness in and doubt of your calling are utterly de- 
structive of power in it. You may, like Saint 



100 THIS MIND 

Paul, feel that you have your treasure in an 
earthly vessel, but being in this service, and 
mindful of the mercy shown you in putting you 
in, you must not be a coward and you must "not 
lose heart in it." And as you draw near the end 
of a life on this level, even though you may be 
battered and wounded, showing loss of limb and 
many signs of battle, you will cry out with 
Koosevelt the strenuous, "It has been a bully 
fight/' or with Saint Paul the aged, in language 
more dignified but in the same spirit: "I have 
fought in a good fight. I have gone through the 
glorious contest." 

Our duty to-day, in addition to all that has 
gone before, is to find or lay the foundation for 
such strength and steadiness, something that 
will throw 

"God's greatness round our incompleteness, 
Bound our restlessness his rest." 

1. In order to have a permanent and sustain- 
ing sense of strength in what you are doing, you 
must have an undoubted and abiding sense of 
its human value and necessity. 

There is a real difference between human neces- 
sity and human advantage. Men are easily con- 
fused between the thing that looks desirable and 
the thing that appears to be necessary. They 
are confused in this regard concerning Jesus 



TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 101 



himself. To some very devout thinkers he 
appears only as an advantage, the very 
best among many who are excellent. They 
think it would be distinctly good if he 
were everywhere approved and his rule 
universally accepted. But, surely, this does not 
adequately interpret his own idea of his own call- 
ing. Such a ministry, such a service as his could 
not have come to pass, could not have been en- 
dured, could not have been carried on steadily if 
he had not felt it all the while to be a human 
necessity. It would have broken down, just as 
many earnest lives do break down, if it had 
rested on the foundation of simple human benefit 
or advantage. One can see a half dozen places 
where only the sense of human necessity carried 
Jesus through. He could not have paid so big 
a price, or have endured what he did endure, 
simply for something that was desirable. Hut- 
ton has some profoundly significant sentences 
in one of his studies : "I have little hope of any 
passionate and cordial return to Christ except 
out of a returning sense of necessity. Deep 
calleth unto deep. Religion when it ceases to be 
felt as necessary begins to chafe. It is the utter 
necessity of faith which flings us on the breast 
of God.' 1 Many times since our return from 
India, China, and Japan, men have asked seri- 
ously whether the people of those countries are 



102 THIS MIND 

not getting along pretty well with the religions 
they have. The question always disturbs me. 
It seems to indicate that Jesus Christ is not a 
necessity to certain parts of the world; that 
maybe there is some other way than his or some 
other name than his; that his objects are only 
admirable — perhaps most admirable — among 
other good men's good objects, but that neither 
Jesus nor his program is a necessity. Wher- 
ever that impression exists it weakens Chris- 
tianity to the point of destroying its power, and 
leaves us helpless before life's deep, real needs. 
Indeed, it only puts a soothing ointment into our 
hands and not a real cure. 

This same effect is produced when one comes to 
feel that he might as well do something else, that 
what he is doing is not essential to anybody, and 
that it is not essential that he should be doing 
it. He can go on through life as millions have 
done and are doing. Life will have no more 
meaning for him than it has for other millions. 
He will be neither prophet, priest, nor Messiah. 
His life will never strike the deepest note or show 
the sacramental quality. Obstacles will easily 
turn him aside. He will not go forward with his 
face set toward Jerusalem at any cost. A reduc- 
tion of salary, a small criticism, a petty opposi- 
tion will make him fling the whole thing to the 
winds. Or, what is just as bad, he will abandon 



TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 103 

his primary passion in his calling and give him- 
self to secondary and immediate plans, to giving 
people what they want. And he will talk of 
democracy and the voice of the people, of re- 
sponding to popular demands and appeals. If 
Nineveh does not want him or appeal to him, he 
will try Tarshish. The voice that sent him, the 
necessity that was laid upon him, will grow dim 
in his ears and light upon his conscience. He 
will easily turn to the Gentiles, discount his 
mission, abandon his early consecration, and for 
the rest of his life talk the language of prudence 
and pessimism. What is far worse, he will show 
a weak will, a weak personality, and a weak hold 
upon his calling. Nothing but an abiding sense 
of the necessity of his calling will sustain him in 
strength as he goes forward in it. For good 
reasons, like loss of health, one may in special 
cases be compelled to change the form of the life 
in which he fulfills his life decision, but if he 
changes the spirit and purpose of it, or lets down 
the passion of his devotion to it, "then dies the 
man in him." A broken voice may force you to 
quit preaching, but if you quit because you have 
lost your vision, lost heart in the ministry, lost 
the sense of God's necessity to human life, the 
Lord have mercy on your own soul, i For Jesus 
Christ is not a temporary answer to a temporary 
need, he is the permanent answer to the eternal, 



104 THIS MIND 

unceasing necessity to which there is no other 
answer. ^ 

2. In order to have a permanent and sustain- 
ing sense of strength in your calling you must 
have an abiding and unquestioning conscious- 
ness of its absolute altruism and unselfishness. 
Nothing will more surely undo a good and sincere 
man in his lifework than the feeling that there 
is a selfish element in him or in it. Of course, 
there are people, plenty of them — too many of 
them — who make no pretense of unselfishness. 
They are in things, often in the best things, with 
a jaunty air and a blase attitude toward selfish- 
ness, as though it were of small concern. But 
these are the people who stay in things while 
they are going well or while there is some advan- 
tage to themselves in staying in. They do not 
get anywhere near the center where Jesus moved 
and was strong. They wear a cross, but they do 
it for symbolic and decorative reasons. They 
do not at all get into Saint Paul's deep words 
about being crucified with Christ. Indeed, they 
resent any pressing of this idea as extreme and 
fanatical. They are devotees of the reasonable 
and moderate. But in this business of unselfish- 
ness there is no such thing as the moderate and 
reasonable. That way cannot be fitted into the 
way of Jesus. He did not live his life on the com- 
mon basis of sharing half and half. He certainly 



TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 105 

did not adopt Jacob's standard which seems so 
wonderfully liberal to so many people. I met 
a man one day who was fairly bursting with 
spiritual pride and a sense of unselfishness be- 
cause he had that year given ten thousand dollars 
for Christian work of various sorts and had only 
kept ninety thousand for himself! He was an 
entirely sensible and practical person from his 
point of view and from the conventional point of 
view. Of course, his universe never gets dis- 
turbed. He keeps it steady. And, of course also, 
his universe never gets ahead. It just goes round 
and round until some time, his time or some 
other, there is a crash. For there is no way to 
preserve the steadiness of life year in and year 
out, from one generation to another, except 
Jesus' way of perfect unselfishness. You may 
not think him practical, but his practice is the 
only one that works. His basis is the only one 
that keeps a person steady and strong in the face 
of all sorts of experiences. The things that 
happen to men do not differ so much as the things 
that happen in men. The only persons who are 
steady in an earthquake are the people who are 
not thinking of its effect on themselves. The 
Master of the absolutely unselfish life is the only 
one who can be calm when the boat is tossing. 
Thousands of men have ruined themselves and 
their callings by becoming anxious about their 



106 THIS MIND 

own fortunes in their callings. They have lost 
their power to do the highest good, they have 
become fussed and troubled because they have 
come to look for the personal advantages that 
they think belong to doing good. Churches often 
go a long way toward ruining their altruism by 
their anxiety over the question of the credit they 
get for being benevolent. You may depend upon 
it, the selfish life is never a strong and steady 
one. Selfishness permanently disturbs the bal- 
ance, and upsets the equilibrium of the spirit. 
If you are making your life decision with the idea 
that you will make some bread for the multitudes 
and some for yourself, that you will save your- 
self and as many others as you can, that you 
will do all the good you can and get all the 
rewards and advantages out of it that can be 
made to come your way, you are laying up for 
yourself a life of restlessness, discontent and un- 
steadiness. You will be weak in your spirit 
and in your calling, weak where weakness is 
fatal, in the center and soul of your very being. 
You can walk that way if you want to, but you 
cannot look for the fellowship of the Great Com- 
panion who never wanted anything for himself. 
"I used to wonder at the cross/' wrote an Ameri- 
can soldier, "but not now. I think Jesus was a 
lucky man to have a chance to die for a great 
cause. 1 ' There is no other way to tranquillity. 



TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 107 

3. You can get and preserve this sense of 
strength by making sure that your life and life 
purposes are in line with the best ideals, pur- 
poses, visions, and dreams of the best men and 
women through the centuries. 

The world is not beginning with you, even 
though you may think so or may wonder how 
it has got along at all without you. The stream 
of history has been running a tolerably long 
time. You are about to get into it either to row 
or to drift. My first anxiety is that you shall 
have a fair general understanding of it, and my 
second that you shall have a right relation to 
it. We are not starting the world all new. Some 
people think it would be well if we could smash 
the existing order and begin all over again. 
Of course this cannot be done, and such experi- 
ments as the French Revolution and other 
efforts do not greatly encourage the idea of doing 
it. In the effort to get a fair general under- 
standing you will quickly see that history has 
not all been bad nor all been good. This stream 
that you enter is not absolutely pure nor per- 
fectly polluted. It might be worse, it might well 
be much better. Your ancestors were men and 
women of many faults and many virtues. They 
were about as wise and about as foolish as their 
descendants. From them you can learn many 
things to do, and likewise many things to avoid. 



108 THIS MIND 

"The Faith of our fathers'' of which we rev- 
erently sing had many superb and shining quali- 
ties and a lot of errors and crude superstitions. 
"The oldtime religion" was good in those blessed 
respects in which it was good, but it evidently 
was not good enough to make our fathers per- 
fect or to save the world through which they 
passed. / That a thing is old does not prove it 
to be either true or good. Its age may only prove 
it to be tough and enduring. ) 

Nevertheless, into this mixed inheritance we 
come, and come inevitably. There is no other 
way to get into our world except through this 
flowing human stream. We cannot ignore it or 
go round it. Suppose, then, ignoring further 
figures of speech, we look squarely at our atti- 
tude to the life we come into and the history we 
inherit. If we come in as most of our fathers 
have done, we shall be as restless as they were 
and as weak as we see them to have been. If we 
enter the life of our day as Jesus entered the life 
of his, we may be strong as he was strong, by 
allying ourselves with only the best and highest 
forces and ideals out of the past and refusing to 
conform to or perpetuate the things that ought 
to perish, f The stream of history will grow worse 
and worse or better and better, according to 
■ what is poured into it by all its tributaries, 
which tributaries for this generation you are.j 



TOWAKD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 109 

If the faith of our children is to be any better 
than the faith of our fathers, if the new-time 
religion is to be any better than the imperfect 
old-time religion, it will be because you put your 
lives for to-day and to-morrow in with the best 
and against the worst ; because you and the next 
generation and the ones after that forever "work 
upward, working out the beast 1 ' in human life. 
Steadiness and strength, wholesomeness and free- 
dom, are obtained by improvement, by alliance 
with the ideals and forces that are excellent. 
And this comes by purpose, by resolution, by 
steady determination to have it so. Do not be 
fooled. (The world does not grow better simply I 
because it grows older. J 

In my youth the township where I lived was 
divided for road-mending and road-making pur- 
poses into districts over which men called super- 
visors were placed. Some of them were utterly 
incompetent, some utterly indifferent, some 
wholly traditional. The roads that were good 
enough for the fathers and pioneers were good 
enough for them. Some of them had an idea of 
better roads for better vehicles and better days. 
But not one of them made a road fit for a modern 
automobile, and not one made an all-the-year- 
round road. You are to join the historic fellow- 
ship of road-makers for the King. Some of them 
have done their work badly. The King's high- 



110 THIS MIND 

way as made by them was hardly fit for the 
King's chariot. They filled no valleys and leveled 
no hills. When the King struck the roads made 
by them his progress was either stopped or 
slowed down. The story as told in history is 
not encouraging or cheerful. Christianity is 
not half as far along to-day as it ought to be or 
as it could have been. If this is as fast as it is 
going to go, it will never overtake or lead civili- 
zation. Some of the road-makers made good 
stretches of road, and the King made swift prog- 
ress over them, only to strike the rough, unfit, 
impassable stretches made by other men as they 
always had been made. You do not get the 
sustaining sense of strength by working with 
that group. In your life time, even in mine yet, 
the highways for the Lord must be made so per- 
fect, by men and women working with the best 
ideals and best people of the centuries, that the 
King's progress in a single generation shall ex- 
ceed anything he has reached in the whole Chris- 
tian era. These highways must run across con- 
tinents, run between nations and races, so that 
the way of the Lord in the world shall be smooth. 
If you can help to make such a way for him, you 
will save your own life from destruction on the 
rough, jolting ways over which your fathers 
went. 

4. You can get and preserve this necessary 



TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 111 

sense of strength and steadiness in your life by 
making sure that you are working with the will 
of God and not against it. 

Another phase of this was mentioned in an 
earlier lecture, but the subject naturally comes 
back again at this point. (We are likely to be 
overborne just now by what many people think 
to be fundamental democracy, namely, running 
always with the majority, or "It always pays to 
shout with the crowd/' or "The voice of the peo- 
ple is the voice of God." Of course, this is 
not democracy at all. Over and over the ma- 
jority is wrong and its voice is against God. We 
do not get our highest ideals from the multitude 
or have them confirmed by popular vote. Israel's 
"saving remnant" was much nearer right than 
Israel's blundering multitude. When the crowd 
yelled for Barabbas, the place of real strength 
and steadiness was where Jesus stood almost 
alone. The star that stays where it ought to stay, 
no matter how the waves toss or the ship turns, 
is worth much more than its weight in gold. 
The will of God is not tossed about by the gusts 
of passion and self-interest that often put wrong 
on the throne. )We agreed that we must work 
in harmony with the best men and women, with 
the best ideals of the centuries. Well, we must 
go further than that for the strength that will 
not fail even if we must climb some new Calvary 



112 THIS MIND 

as part of the day's work. We must not go into 
our lifework on a short view or a narrow one, 
on a dim vision or a confused one. If we are 
going in to be strong and steady, we must be 
very sure that we are in harmony with God's 
will, God's purposes, God's plans for the world 
in which we live. 

We have inherited a miserable idea that the 
will of God is to be suffered or endured, that it 
is hard and grinding, that it finds its chief ex- 
pression in afflictions, personal trials, and dis- 
agreeable duties, especially forcing choice youth 
into unattractive occupations. I think in my 
youth I always heard the will of God spoken of 
in a tone of resignation or conscious martyrdom 
or with a snivel. Shouting Methodists were 
plenty, but I never heard any of them shouting 
over the will of God as a thing to be done. They 
were always shouting over some experience of 
the love of God which was to be enjoyed. But 
the will of God for them came nowhere near the 
region of religious enjoyment. If they got any 
pleasure out of it, it was in spite of the will of 
God. It remained for me to discover in later years 
a different note in the matchless life. "I do 
always those things that please him." Wher- 
ever, whenever, whatever he wants, I am for it, 
for it is the best thing going. It is as if Jesus 
heard God always saying, "Come, let us do this 



TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 113 

or that, let us go here or there," and had replied 
with an emphasis Roosevelt never touched with 
his favorite word, "I delight to do thy will, for 
there is nothing better." Even in Gethsemane 
he said, not with a sob or an appeal for pity, but 
with a shout and a tone of victory : "His will, 
his glorious will, his beautiful will for the world 
and for me, be done, done no matter where it 
leads. Rise, let us be going, before Calvary gets 
away without my having the chance to climb it 
with a cross." 

Jesus had a lot of enthusiasms, but his enthu- 
siasm for the will of God in the world and in his 
own life amounted almost to an obsession. It 
was not a vague enthusiasm for humanity or for 
an abstract principle or a good cause. He 
reveled and gloried and, if he had done such 
things, he would have rioted in the will of God. 
And in Jesus' relation to God's will you must 
get to it. In him you must see what it is and 
ought to be for you. We too vaguely take the 
will of God into account or do it only as a kind 
of final throw of pious submission. Jesus lived 
in it. It was his strength, his steadiness, his 
peace, his everlasting rapture. 

It must be interpreted in the light of such 
questions as these : What does God propose in 
the world? What kind of a world is he really 
trying to make? What is he trying to do, what 



114 THIS MIND 

has he been trying to do for men and races? 
What is he trying to teach people and trying to 
get them to be and do? If he had his way, if 
his will were done, what would happen? What 
kind of a world would it be if the will of God 
should be done in it? How would we be living 
in this year 1922 in the United States, in Europe, 
in Africa, and Asia and the rest of the world if 
the will of God as Jesus knew it had been done 
for the last score of years or were being done 
now? What would be happening to the poor, 
the rich, the ignorant, the educated, the weak, 
the strong, the Negro, the Jew, the Chinaman, 
the Russian, the German, the Englishman, the 
American, if the will of God were to be done? I 
am for it. I cannot see anything else with any 
great promise in it, cannot see anything else 
worth tying up fifty years of endeavor to. This 
holds the future. If we are going any way that 
is worth going, this is the only way to go. There 
are no other standards worth conforming to. 
This is not a party ideal nor a partial one. 
Will the Pharisees and the Sadducees and all 
their modern successors, and all others who 
divide the body of Christ, please step aside or 
step into line. The youth of the world, the 
youth of the colleges are proposing, God bless 
them, proposing with a shout, to make a new 
fellowship, a fellowship with Jesus, the fellow- 



TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 115 

ship of those who love and do the will of God. 
It will be fair as the moon, bright as the sun, and 
terrible as an army with banners. This is the 
really going concern in the world to-day. Are 
you in it? God is the great endeavorer, trying 
in a thousand ways, all of them good. Are you 
with him? He has the only plan that looks as 
though it would work. Are you going into it, 
or only partly in, or wholly into some other? 
If you want to know the will of God, if you want 
to love it, if you earnestly w T ant it to be done, 
get into it in faith, fellowship, endeavor, and 
enthusiasm with Jesus, who knew what it was 
and what it would do, and who conformed his 
life to it. 

5. You will get and maintain the sense of 
strength and steadiness in your life and its pur- 
poses through the abiding conviction, based upon 
wisdom, that your life plans, if worked out, 
would work well. 

There is such a thing as Christian pragmatism, 
the trial of a philosophy or plan by the simple 
test, "Does it work?" By this test your plans 
must be judged, by it the purposes of Jesus him- 
self are judged. In his case we are making a 
fundamental blunder through getting our tenses 
and moods confused. There has been a lot of 
foolish speculation over the question : "Would 
his plans have worked well if they had been tried 



116 THIS MIND 

through?" The implications in the question are 
that he belongs to the past and that the fair trial 
of his purposes is no longer possible. Nothing 
could be further from the fact. He and his plans 
hold the present and the future. At this hour 
there is really no other who is even claiming to 
have a world plan. But the real question here 
is whether your life decisions lead you to a life 
program that will also surely work clear through 
for world advantage. Human life and society 
are far too precious to be experimented on by 
theorists and charlatans who do not know how 
their experiments will turn out. And your lives 
are too valuable to have them destroyed by the 
fever of uncertainty and wonder as to their out- 
come. Your generation ought to do something 
far better than just to leave the world as you 
found it or even a little better. The slow pro- 
gress of past generations is too slow. We have 
made inventions and material improvements for 
life faster than we have made moral gains. This 
generation that is now young ought to change 
that. You will have the same sense of weakness 
and unsteadiness that your fathers have had if 
you bring no higher tests to your lives than they 
brought to theirs. As Thomas Arnold put it, 
"We must be superior to our fathers or we shall 
be monstrously inferior to them.") Old heads are 
weary, but we are persuaded better things of you 



TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 117 

than of ourselves. When we were young we 
quoted the words of Lowell, then living as we 
were, with Civil War and slavery echoes in our 
souls : 

"Once to every man and nation comes the moment 
to decide, 

In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good 
or evil side; 

Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each 
the bloom or blight, 

Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep 
upon the right, 

And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that dark- 
ness and that light." 

But the choice does not go by forever even 
though it goes by for one group or one genera- 
tion. "Every day is a fresh beginning" in a very 
real sense. "Every morn is the world made new" 
in a very true way. And the new choices come 
and keep on coming until or unless we have 
sinned away the day of grace of new opportuni- 
ties. 

I fear sometimes that God may have grown 
discouraged with my generation as a whole, 
though it has done some glorious things; that 
he may be saying, sorrowfully : "I cannot expect 
much more from that crowd. They have grown 
spiritually conservative and cautious and have 
lost the spirit of adventure. Maybe the best that 
can now be expected of them is that they shall 



118 THIS MIND 

not stand in the way of youth while youth girds 
up its loins and ties its shoes to run as heralds 
to prepare the way for the King who comes." 
For it is Jesus or nobody, as the thing looks to- 
day. And, really, also he has to depend upon 
the youth of America and Britain, the youth of 
Asia and Europe, the youth of Africa and the 
islands of all the seas to give him a new real 
chance again in the world. Are you with him? 
Can he count on you? Has he your vote? Do 
your decisions match up with his plans in this 
sure fashion? 

We are fairly worn out, but he is not worn at 
all. He is neither exhausted with weariness nor 
pumped out to emptiness. Suppose, then, the 
youth of to-day should enthusiastically go after 
him, loyally go with him, go the whole length 
as their elders have not done, should give him 
their word and stand by it as he stood by his, 
what would happen? 

Jesus must depend on the men and women his 
own age and younger for certain things older 
people cannot give him. Jesus was twelve when 
he made the doctors marvel at him as at a 
prodigy. He was thirty when he began his 
ministry. But then men of fifty and sixty find 
it a bit hard to give themselves absolutely and 
unreservedly to the leadership of a man of thirty, 
especially if his way looks a bit revolutionary to 



TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 119 

them. Men of that age get in the middle of the 
road, they are afraid to violate the speed limit, 
they talk about the fathers and the old order 
and caution their age not to go too fast. It was 
so in Jesus' day ; it is so to-day. College men on 
both sides of the sea will listen to men of my age 
respectfully because of our age, but they will 
not leap to our message as they did when Henry 
Drummond at about thirty years of age went 
from college to college with the breath of the 
morning on him, calling men to follow that 
Other One who was the same age as himself. I 
think I can understand the elders and members 
of the Sanhedrin who did not understand Jesus, 
but I cannot understand how the youth of his 
day, or the youth of any day, fellows like that 
rich young ruler, failed to see his meaning for 
them and their value to him, and let their chance 
go by. 

For example, there was a day when he knew 
and explained how to save the world. He had 
thought it clear through. He knew the truth, 
the power, the way. He saw the end from the 
beginning. His plans would have saved the 
Jewish nation for its real uses, the uses that have 
been utterly perverted and hopelessly degraded 
in the world. He knew the way to save the Gen- 
tile world that had no special relation to him. 
The men of his day, the elders and the youth, 



120 THIS MIND 

balked and failed him. They took a referendum 
and put him to death. And the so-called Chris- 
tian centuries followed, centuries that are 
covered with blood, centuries that have come to 
a culmination before our eyes in a moral and 
spiritual world welter. The history of it all is 
not very comfortable reading. 

He knows now how to save the modern Jewish 
race, the race whose history is* both tragic and 
glorious, whose condition is both pitiful and 
powerful. The way to its salvation lies not in 
Zionism, nor the return to Palestine, nor in the 
observance of the ceremonies of Moses, nor in the 
ancient and wonderful law. The old Jew came 
over those paths, to the turning point where he 
went in the wrong direction. The old Jew is 
still trying the old way, and it does not work. 
The young Jew of this day has again the chance 
of the young Jew of Jesus' day, to go with him 
instead of with the Sanhedrin. He is young. 
He appeals to youth. The young ruler of to-day, 
ruler of Jewish opinion, can do better than his 
ancient ancestor did. The other one walked 
away from the only Saviour of the race and the 
world. The one now living in New York, in 
London, in Jerusalem can go with Jesus and 
maybe swing this generation and the next toward 
their salvation. There is no other way. Their 
life decisions reach into the very fate of the 



TOWARD THE STRENGTH OF LIFE 121 

Jewish people in the world. They are not merely 
personal. They are racial. 

He knows how to save China and Japan and 
India. The official classes, the military parties, 
the hereditary rulers, the hardened conservatives 
do not see it. They think there is either no way 
at all or some other way. Their conservatism, 
their alliance w T ith property and with power and 
their lack of adventure make them impossible. 
Maybe they can keep Jesus out and block the 
way for the only plan that will w r ork well. The 
hope of those countries for to-day and to-morrow 
lies not in the young political revolutionists who 
will grab power into their own hands. For those 
countries, as for ours, it is Jesus or chaos. And 
the youth of the universities and colleges, the 
men and the women who have studied in America 
and Britain, the youth who are the makers of 
to : morrow can make China, Japan, and India 
Christian. Nobody else will do it. No one else 
has the courage, the vision, the abandon, the free- 
dom, the time, the contact with the future, the 
forward look. They can harden as their fathers 
have done into guardians of property and tradi- 
tion. If they do, the present order will continue 
until a new earthquake breaks up the world. 
They can lead their nations as they will, but only 
by going Jesus' way with him can they lead their 
nations out. Need I go on? Have you been 



122 THIS MIND 

thinking only or chiefly of young Jew or young 
Oriental and not chiefly of young American? 
Your life decisions run into something far beyond 
what you are going to be or do. They run into 
the redemption of the nations, into a new history 
in which Jesus may have his perfect way and 
the world its final salvation. And you can go 
into your life work with steady step if these are 
the principles upon which you walk. And you 
can go through life without petty fuss and fret 
if these principles are allowed to give strength 
and steadiness to you. You will not escape 
obstacle, opposition, or hatred, any more than 
that Other One did. But these principles will 
keep your lives from being broken or weakened 
from within, and the rest is victory. 



THIS MIND TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 

I In the last analysis all vital questions are per- 
sonal. All life decisions run both soon and late, 
first and last, into personal relations. They have 
their final and deepest meaning in their personal 
contacts and outcome. Causes have no real 
meaning other than their personal meaning. 
War is not an abstract matter, but an intensely 
personal one, involving the very lives of both sol- 
diers and civilians, involving them both in mis- 
fortune. Poverty is not a vague, abstract, im- 
personal condition, to be understood by a study 
of charts, or cured by an aphorism. Poverty is 
tragically personal and has to do with the food, 
the clothing, the homes, the health, the education, 
the happiness, and even the faith of men and 
women and children. Temperance is not a cause 
in its actual and appealing essence. It is a 
purely human issue running so deep into the lives 
of human beings that it bleeds wherever and 
whenever you cut into it. The so-called social 
question is at last a strictly personal and human 
question. The era just gone has been in special 
plegree the era of the social emphasis. Possibly 

123 



124 THIS MIND 

the period in which the college men and women 
of to-day will live their lives and do their 
work may continue to be such an era. But the 
social question has absorbed many good people 
merely as a question, has led to the proclamation 
of many very noble social theories and principles, 
without reaching any very notable change in 
personal relations which is really the center, the 
crux of the whole problem. The social principles 
and teachings of Jesus have been profoundly 
studied and ably expounded by many earnest 
men and women. The literature of this subject 
was never so abundant or so excellent as now. 
But your life decision must go much deeper than 
simply the acceptance of these admirable social 
theories so finely set forth in our time. The life 
decisions of Jesus ran straight into personal 
relations, his relations with persons. And these 
relations were immediate, direct, and wholly his 
own. He was not an armchair friend of 
humanity in the abstract, not a philosopher spec- 
ulating about humanity. He had personal con- 
cern for and personal contact with all sorts of 
persons. That was where his life purpose and 
decision led him and kept him. He never allowed 
himself to get at even one remove from these 
personal interests. 

You will find a marked tendency in the world 
and even in your own lives pretty soon for men 



TOWAKD OTHER PERSONS 125 

and women to become absorbed in organization. 
It may be a church, or a Christian Association, 
or a missionary society, or some other great con- 
cern. These and like organizations have to be 
administered. There is no other way. But woe 
betide the men and women whose life calling 
makes them at last only organizers and adminis- 
trators of institutions, however necessary and 
useful. The organization grows in their lives, 
and the individual, human spirit withers, and 
humanity as existent in individuals has lost one 
more chance. 

First: My first point, then, for to-day is that 
every calling must be thought of and interpreted 
in the light of its meaning for personality. Every 
calling is a human calling or it is no calling at 
all. Many of the callings that lay hold of men 
and women have got clear away from their real 
center and need to be brought back to it. In 
other words, the very first thing to do with more 
than one of the large forms of human activity 
is to humanize it. There is an everlasting tend- 
ency from which no occupation escapes to become 
dehumanized or professionalized. When that 
tendency reaches its natural outcome the result 
is beyond words. For a merely professional 
interest in men and women, or in your calling 
itself, is both unprofessional and inhuman. 
Therefore I emphasize this point of the necessity 



126 THIS MIND 

of the human spirit as fundamental, no matter 
what you are going to do. If you are not going 
to organize your life around its human purpose, 
test it by its human quality and outcome, then 
your life decision goes straight away from and 
even straight into conflict with the mind of 
Christ. Teachers are not primarily teachers of 
subjects, primary, secondary, or advanced. If 
one regards himself as a teacher of a subject, he 
will become that deadly bane of the school, a 
teacher more concerned about his subject than 
about his students. He will develop intellectual 
pride because he knows things, which will become 
intellectual dryness, because things are all he 
knows, and end in intellectual sterility because 
personal interest is lacking. It is the pupil and 
the human interest that lie in his life, that save 
the teacher from the evil tendencies of his own 
calling. Physicians are not, in the soul of them, 
men and women who practice medicine. Not 
such a physician was William MacLure, the coun- 
try Doctor of the Old School. He and all true 
physicians are devoted, soul and body, to their 
human, suffering patients. A doctor ought to be 
so human that the death of a patient would just 
about send him to bed for sheer grief over the 
loss of a life. It would not be fair for me to give 
the impression that the ministry is exempt from 
this tendency. It is not exempt. A score of influ- 



TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 127 

ences tend to harden and dehumanize it. Some of 
these influences are not bad in themselves. Take 
the minister's interest in his doctrines, his truth, 
his studies. They cannot have a subordinate or 
minor place in his life. He must study. He 
ought to study harder than any other man in the 
world. He must master doctrines and follow 
truth to its last reach. But his fundamental 
passion, the passion that saves him from aloof- 
ness, out-of-touchness, and even from intellectual 
death at last, is the human passion for the men 
and women of all ages and kinds to whom God 
has sent him. All his truth is for them. All his 
doctrines are in their behalf. He must study 
"daily, nightly and eternally," not because he is 
a student, but because he is a minister to people. 
He has no abstract interest, as a minister, in 
abstract truth. His lot in life has been cast in 
the one most passionately human occupation in 
the hands of men. 

I am trying to say that in your life decisions 
you must hold firmly to the human interest and 
personal values, as dominant and controlling. 
Everything must bend to them and conform to 
them. Some of you will not be teachers or 
physicians or ministers. Some of you will be 
merchants, bankers, engineers, or farmers, and 
you will go in, as like as not, on a false basis. 
You want to regard these as "callings," "call- 



128 THIS MIND 

ings" in the Christian sense, and you will find, 
after you get into them, that the ideals that rule 
them are mainly material and commercial and 
not Christian at all. You will hear enough about 
"business principles" to break your spirit. And 
you will be told whenever you bring a new note 
into things, that "business is business." You 
will hear about efficiency until you will fairly 
hate it. You will not be dishonest or unfair. 
You will not break the laws of the land, most 
of which relate to property directly and only a 
few to human interest as an immediate concern, 
but you will have the fight of your life to keep the 
human note, the human interest, the human pas- 
sion, dominant enough to warrant you in regard- 
ing these occupations as being anywhere near 
"callings" according to the mind of Christ. No 
calling that you will go into is free from this 
tendency. There is an old scripture, full of 
meaning when read with proper emphasis, that 
bears directly upon this point. A prophet was 
ordered to guard a man, under severe penalty 
for failure. And the prophet let him get away, 
saying weakly to the king, "As thy servant was 
busy here and there, the man escaped." That 
is the long, sad, human story. The servants of 
God are busy here and there, rushing to and fro, 
fussing over things, and men escape. Sometimes 
it is the man in the care of the prophet, some- 



TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 129 

times it is the man in the prophet himself, but 
whenever it happens, a new chapter in misfor- 
tune is written. 

/And you will early discover that you find it 
easier to have and maintain an indirect human 
interest than an immediate one. It is easier to 
have and to preach noble sentiments concerning 
people than it is to maintain noble practices and 
attitudes among them. It is easier to frame, 
harmonize, and hold a lot of principles than to 
get along with a lot of very concrete persons. 
Many people fool themselves into believing that 
they are real human beings because they quote 
with approval certain sentimental verse, or weep 
over pathetic play or novel, or send checks to 
charity organizations. There ought to be a 
course in all schools, from grades through uni- 
versities, on how to be a human being. J 

We are thinking, all the while, of life decisions 
and just now are emphasizing the fundamental 
truth that all our decisions and the lives that 
follow them must be intensely, deeply, constantly 
human. And we cannot help thinking how that 
other young Person made his decisions in the 
light of his human relations. Nor can we help 
thinking of the life that followed. The memory 
and vision of that set our pulses to hammering. 
He did the thing we want to do. He proved 
that it can be done. The organization, the insti- 



130 THIS MIND 

tution never incrusted or overbore him. Having 
loved his own, not a very lovely or lovable lot, 
he loved them clear through to the end. He did 
it. It can therefore be done. Really, I would 
know that it could be done because it is so good, 
so necessary, so inevitable if humanity m to come 
to anything. But to have seen it is enough to 
set us shouting. Since it has been done by the 
living Christ, it can be done with the living- 
Christ. / An English writer the other day pointed 
out the difference between memories that are 
fading and examples that are compelling. Then 
he added : "We march to the dying music of great 
traditions. There is no captain of civilization at 
the head of our ranks." But as the Lord liveth 
and as my soul liveth, I declare my conviction 
that we have an example that is compelling, 
that we march to stirring music of high adven- 
ture, with the Great White Captain at our head. 
This is a going concern. Jesus is a forward-going 
Person. He holds the future. He was the light 
on this real problem, and in Browning's words, 
"The light that did burn will burn." J 

Second : But this very talk of humanizing our 
decisions and our callings leads us farther. It 
does not end here, f History and experience teach 
us many things, nothing more surely than this, 
that you cannot humanize your decision nor 
your life service except by Christianizing the 



: 



TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 131 

decision and forever striving to Christianize the 
order, the group, the activity that you go into. 
You may decide to be a Christian teacher, a 
Christian lawyer, a Christian farmer, banker, 
engineer, editor, or a Christian doctor. Thou- 
sands of others have done that. We have had 
and we do have Christian men and women in 
every calling named. We have no better indi 
vidual Christians than many who can be found in 
those occupations. But that does not cover the 
case. A life decision simply to be a Christian 
farmer will leave the whole farming\uestion just 
where it is as far as you are concerned. A friend 
writes me these serious words : "I hope you will 
help the chap who is going into business, or 
engineering, or farming, etc., to see that he must 
organize his business, his engineering, his farm- 
ing around a Christian purpose. S9 often he 
thinks he can count one of these types of work a 
'calling,' yet when he gets out into it the 'Chris- 
tian' technique of it all is so uncharted that he 
does not know how to work it out and the vision 
fades. ,' I wonder how a Grenfell w T ould work out 
his medical, Christian vision in London or New 
York, or just what Sam Higginbotham would 
call Christian farming in McLean or Champaign 
County. . . . ( What I am trying to say is 
that the business man, farmer, engineer, banker, 
lawyer, etc., who thinks that providing support, 

J 



132 THIS MIND 

personal and financial, for the church and other 
ideal causes is the way he is to function as a 
Christian, the way he is to fulfill the life decision 
made at Lake Geneva or elsewhere, needs to see 
that within the calling he has been chosen by, 
there is a Christianizing process needed at his 
hands." ) The old order will remain and not give 
place to the new until this happens. We can 
see where the present practice has brought us. 
It has not introduced or established the mind of 
Christ in these occupations. This same friend 
adds: "It is not 'old diplomats' only who are 
ruining the world, but 'old engineers/ 'old 
bankers/ 'old farmers/ etc. They are living their 
lives according to the standards of their occupa- 
tions, but they must be made to see and feel the 
chance for Christianizing their social order, their 
particular occupational order." The life deci- 
sion to be a farmer in Dakota or Alberta is not 
a life decision according to the mind of Christ if 
it simply looks toward better crops of grain and 
a personal Christian life. It is only a true life 
decision according to his mind when it gives 
itself, positively, persistently, affectionately, un- 
wearyingly to Christianizing the farming order 
in Dakota and Alberta. Here is a chance for 
pioneers, a chance wide as the occupations of 
men and women, a chance that Jesus would leap 
to, a chance that would go far toward saving the 



TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 133 

world. It is the only way to make a "calling" 
out of an occupation. 

The brilliant young layman who edits The 
Century declares that he could name twenty 
American business men who could bring peace 
into the industrial world if with consecration 
and sacrifice they would set themselves to find- 
ing and making the way out. And if that does 
not constitute a Christian calling, it would be 
hard to find one. If the twenty men of to-day 
do not do it, twenty men of to-morrow must. For 
this is the human problem, the Christian problem 
that lies in that area of life. Of course, we never 
shall get through as long as we think this is only 
a question of shorter hours and larger wages, or 
longer hours, lower wages, and larger dividends. 
And this problem, like most others, can only be 
met by the men who are within it. External 
evangelism can never be anything but partial 
and imperfect. The humanizing and Christian- 
izing of the order of farmers, engineers, bankers, 
and the like lies at last in the hands of farmers, 
engineers, and bankers. You can go into any 
one of these. You may prosper according to the 
ordinary standards in any of them. But if you 
are proposing, as you ought, to grow through a 
consecrating life decision into one of them, you 
must look for and make a new order before your 
sun sets at the end of your day. 



134 THIS MIND 

Third: My third point on this subject must 
relate to the sense of human values which men 
carry into their life decisions. I would not need 
to argue the value of a million dollars. Every- 
body sees or thinks he sees how desirable such a 
sum would be. That is a standard with which we 
are all familiar. If a man looks particularly well 
or feels so, he is playfully told or playfully says 
that he looks or feels "like a million dollars." 
If, on the other hand, he is low in his mind, he 
feels "like thirty cents." These easy, flippant 
sentences assume that human life and conditions 
can be measured by these standards. And it is 
hard even in a democracy for us to hold a level 
sense of human values. Our theories as stated 
in the Declaration of Independence rather break 
down in the presence of individuals to whom the 
Declaration does not seem to apply. We are con- 
fused between the truth, which we feel must be a 
real truth in the noble sentence, and the apparent 
worth of certain individuals. Our poetry con- 
cerning the value of a man we feel must be true. 
There is no other way to live than upon such 
theories as the poet sings. He cannot sing on any 
other key. But practically we find it hard to 
make the splendid verse fit certain squalid 
humanity that we know. We do not want to sur- 
render our ideals or our lofty principles, and we 
do not want to deceive ourselves as to the actual 



TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 135 

facts of human life, the apparent values of men 
and women. This is one of those disturbing 
anomalies that life is so full of. No one wants 
to make a life decision to give his life unre- 
servedly to human service if human life is not 
worth such a consecration. More than one 
radiant spirit has been broken by the hard facts 
of human life. The loss of the sense of life's 
infinite value cuts the nerve of sacrificial devo- 
tion. When one comes to his lifework with an 
idealized humanity in his mind and finds that 
he has to work with and work for a materialized, 
commercialized, or even a brutalized humanity, 
his very first temptation in his discouragement is 
to doubt the worth-whileness of his consecration, 
or to compromise by hunting some more promis- 
ing materials. When the Jews to whom he hope- 
fully goes ruthlessly trample on his high pur- 
poses and break him on the hard wheel of in- 
difference and opposition, he is sorely tempted 
to pick up what consecration he has left and go 
off to some Gentiles somewhere who from a 
distance look more promising. I know what lies 
ahead of you. But I know also what that Other 
One found in his path. And in this matter, as in 
all the rest, I want that the mind that was in him 
and continued to be in him shall also be in you. 
The hard facts of human life struck him fully 
as hard as they will ever strike you. They killed 



136 THIS MIND 

him, at last, as far as such a person can be killed 
by such forces. If ever a person could be justi- 
fied in quitting, Jesus was so justified. But it 
never seems to have occurred to him to give up. 
As I read his story, the story of Avhat he ran 
up against with the people he worked with, I 
have two wonders in my mind : I wonder how he 
held on in the face of the actual, evident human 
facts, and I wonder at what particular point 
my own spirit would have broken and led me to 
quit. Then I get down on my knees and thank 
God that he did not lose heart even when Peter 
played the fool or Judas the traitor or when the 
others were so dull. And on my knees in grati- 
tude, I pray that this mind may also be in me, 
and in you, and all the rest of us.^He evidently 
saw under the surface, the ugly surface, the 
immediate meaning of personality, the universal 
meaning of personality, and the eternal meaning 
of personality, and because of what he saw, could 
say the finest words ever spoken as to life serv- 
ice : "For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they 
may be sanctified in the truth." For their sakes 
— they are worth it; I make myself fit and offer 
myself up — that is my life service ; that they may 
be made M and may enter the royal fellowship 
of service in the truth — that is the end, and it 
is worth while. He kept his pronouns perfectly 
straight — as severe a test as any man or woman 



TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 137 

ever meets. But here is where you get your true 
idea of the worth of human life. You do not 
get it from the philosophers or poets. You get 
it in seeing what Jesus proposed to do for men, 
what he thought they were worth. The price 
mark on them is his image, or if you choose to 
say it, his cross. They are worth that. And if 
they are worth that to him, they are worth it 
to us. If he decided his lifework and lived his 
life on this theory as to the worth of men, I see 
no other theory for any one of us. The mind that 
is in us must be the mind that was in him. He 
was the only real expert judge of the worth of a 
man. Neither the pessimist nor the optimist, the 
rhapsodist nor the specialist can take a place 
with him. I 

One of my young minister friends read these 
lectures before they were spoken. Among other 
things he writes these words which I gladly add 
to my own pages : "I wonder whether you have 
sufficiently stressed the fact of Christ's faith in 
man. The mind of Jesus is a miracle to me. No 
other mind that has dreamed under our human 
sky had so long a flight of thought, so clear a 
vision of reality. Nothing is more awe-inspiring 
than his faith in the kingdom of God as a prac- 
tical program and policy for the world. And 
that kingdom he declared should be built out of 
the familiar and lovable things of every day. 



138 THIS MIND 

If any one had a right to be a cynic or a pessi- 
mist, it was Jesus. Nevertheless, after receiv- 
ing hate as the reward of love, he believed in man 
right up to the cross. Do we not need to go at 
least that far before our doubts are to be taken 
as valid?" 

Fourth : My fourth point in this connection is 
that Jesus interpreted his life decision and life- 
work on the basis of an equal interest in people 
who themselves were very different from one 
another. Some of his own sayings seem to mean 
the other thing. His emphasis upon his mission 
to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, upon his 
calling of sinners, not righteous, to repentance; 
his zeal for the lost sheep, the lost coin, and 
the prodigal son, lend color to this special inter- 
pretation. But a study of his life as a whole 
corrects our partial views and saves us from 
making narrow and partial relationships. He 
sought each individual on the basis of that indi- 
vidual's need and capacity. He did not propose 
to go blindly after all individuals as though they 
were all alike. Some were lepers, some were 
harlots, some were publicans, some rich rulers, 
some unfortunate, some prosperous, some weak, 
some strong. What the historic prayer describes 
as "all classes and conditions of men" were in his 
full view. His work was for each according to 
his need, his call was from each according to his 



TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 139 

ability, but his interest was uniform. He played 
no favorites. There are many whose life goes 
wrong here. Seeing clearly what a given group 
or class needs, moved by the condition of those 
who are unfortunate either by reason of sick- 
ness or poverty, they fling their lives into serv- 
ice for the single class, sometimes almost with 
bitterness toward other classes. I know men, 
for instance, who have no gospel at all except 
for the group which they have chosen as their 
own. And, as a rule, this prevents their having 
any true gospel of Christ even for their own 
group. No matter what group they choose they 
get into a false attitude to it through their 
failure to take Jesus 7 attitude to all other groups. 
There is a specialization that leads inevitably 
to falsity of view.( A recent writer has pointed 
out that "the constant contemplation of maps 
colored red undoubtedly leads to failure to 
appreciate the other colors of the palette." And 
fMr. Balfour has remarked upon "the difficulty 
of finding any enthusiast who will tell the simple 
truth." ; He does not mean to tell an untruth, 
but he neither sees life steady nor sees it whole, 
whereas it was exactly the strength of Jesus that 
he did see it steady and see it whole. Your work 
may be with a particular group, class, or race, 
but your work will not be at its best if you for- 
get that your group, your class, your race, is an 



140 THIS MIND 

integral and essential part of mankind as a 
whole; and that at other points, with other 
groups, other races, other classes, other men and 
women like yourselves are lifting and lighting 
toward that 

"One far off divine event 
Toward which the whole creation moves." 

There is not a piece of human life on the planet 
that is not worth any best man's best efforts, 
and there is not a piece anywhere that is going 
to be helped or saved by being hated or scorned 
or held in bitterness or indifference. 

Fifth : My fifth point is that this mind toward 
other persons finds its real expression in friend- 
ship. You may begin by being patrons of and 
workers with a given group, but this cannot be 
the end of your relation if your life service is 
to go according to the mind of Christ. (You may 
give people money, you may give them work, 
you may give them justice, you may give them 
comfort, you may give them education, you may 
give them art and music, and even religion of a 
sort, but if you do not give them friendship, 
your work among them remains professional and 
formal and incomplete. This may not be the 
basis upon which it begins. Friendship is not 
the product of simple resolution, even of good 
resolution. Your work may begin on the basis 



TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 141 

of interest and duty, but somewhere along the 
line the fine flower of genuine friendship must 
break into bloom, or there is something wrong. 
The future has nothing better to offer you than 
this precious relation. It had nothing better to 
offer Jesus himself, j There are many episodes 
in his life which thrill and grip us. There is 
none over which I linger more gladly than I do 
over the moment when he said to his small 
crowd : "Henceforth I call you friends." Do not 
miss the whole meaning of the story by your 
interest in one phase of it. What it meant to the 
men who heard it is almost beyond our concep- 
tion. I wonder often what would have happened, 
what I would have done, if I had been one of the 
men to whom he said that. You may be sure there 
would have been a storm or some overwhelming 
demonstration in the face of such a statement. 
But the feelings of the men is only part of the 
story. Think of Jesus' own feeling as he finally 
uttered that noble, that infinitely personal word. 
He had been their Teacher, their Saviour, their 
Physician, their Leader, their Master. They had 
been his disciples, his converts, his patients, his 
followers, his servants. And that is a great deal. 
But if that is all he gets, it is not enough. It 
is not enough for any one, for any man, for Jesus 
or for God himself. Somewhere in that path of 
teaching, of saving, of leading, friendship must 



142 THIS MIND 

come out to crown it all or they have all missed 
the perfect result. Life service in the school, in 
the pulpit, in medicine, in politics, in missions, 
in business, in farming ; life service for Jesus, life 
service for any of us must come at last to this. 
There are many glad hours in the life of a teacher 
or a preacher or a physician. The mental 
awakening of a student, the spiritual expansion 
of a convert, the renewed health of a patient — 
these are rewards beyond all computation. But 
when teacher or preacher or physician discovers 
that friendship has come out of service he knows 
the high rapture that Jesus knew when he ran 
up that flag and waved it in the face of the world. 
Some day the world will find out the meaning of 
religion as friendship, its meaning for God and 
men, and when the world finds that out, the 
light of a new morning will be in the sky and in 
the hearts of men. J 

Sixth : Finally, this mind toward other persons 
works out and will especially work out in the 
life time of those now young, into those large 
areas that we call race relations in the world 
near and far. The youth of to-day are making 
their life decisions at a time when world relation- 
ships are out in the front. I think I decided to 
enter the ministry forty years ago without even 
thinking that my ministry would have anything 
except a local significance or mean anything 



TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 143 

much except to the congregations and towns to 
which it might lead me. It did not occur to me 
that I would have or would need anything except 
an academic, long-range, missionary attitude to- 
ward the Chinese, the Japanese, or the Negroes. 
Such an attitude would be almost impossible to- 
day. One might expect to-day that all his life he 
would teach or preach or farm in Indiana, but 
in making such a decision he would be conscious 
that, no matter where he taught or preached or 
farmed, he would be in vital contact with race 
problems, class problems, national relationships 
and world relationships. Whether one chooses 
it or not, the race question, for example, crowds 
into his school room or his church or trips him 
in the furrow that he is trying to plow. Even 
our self-centered, isolated country, that never in- 
tended such a thing at all, has got caught in the 
world-welter and is all mixed up not with simple 
reds, whites, and blues, but with blacks, browns, 
and yellows. And the men who are working- 
over problems of international economics, inter- 
national disarmament, new boundaries and new 
maps, whether they fully realize it or not are 
really in this human race-welter that cannot be 
escaped. Now, it is no part of this study to go 
into the race or international problem. What 
we are thinking of lies earlier than that. We are 
thinking of that mind toward other persons that 



144 THIS MIND 

in our life purpose and life decision we are going 
to carry into and through our lives. For we 
shall not be able to help a bit unless we have the 
right mind on these questions. 

Elsewhere, speaking for niy colleagues, I have 
made statements some of which in substance are 
repeated here. (See Bishops' Address to the 
General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal 
Church for 1920.) The world is not a white 
man's world, the Christian Church is not a white 
man's church. The races of the world have been 
thrown together by the World War as never be- 
fore. It is now necessary to make right human 
relations or the next war will be a race conflict 
that will destroy civilization. And we must not 
wait as we did about the World War until the 
crash comes and then rush in to save what we 
can out of the wreck. The generation in which 
the college men and women of to-day will do their 
work must do better than any other generation 
has done, better than all generations have done, 
or the world is likely to do worse. The gospel 
of catastrophe has utterly failed. The gospel of 
construction must be tried or the world will be 
ruined. 

You must, therefore, bring to this issue a 
mind free from race prejudice, race narrowness, 
race snobbishness, and race hatred. That will 
be more than your fathers and mothers did, but 



TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 145 

if you only do as well as they have done, you will 
do much worse than they did. Men are still 
talking of superior races and inferior races, rul- 
ing races and subject races, races born to conquer 
and races born to be conquered. And for the 
life of me I cannot see that the mind of Christ 
runs that way. Nor can I see that any life 
decision made on that basis and worked out in 
that spirit could possibly be a Christian decision 
or work out a Christian result. The application 
of the mind of Christ is not easy, will not be 
easy, but it is ten times as easy in the long run 
— and, I think, in the short run — as the applica- 
tion of any other mind to this question. And we 
cannot have his mind toward ourselves and to- 
ward the people we like and admire, unless we 
also have it toward all the people whose blood 
is red. You cannot do crooked thinking here and 
come out straight. And there is only one road 
to the kingdom of peace in this world or the next, 
and that is a straight road. We must make our 
life decision with the determination to have the 
mind of Christ clear through this and all other 
human problems. This is the big one, so big 
that no previous generation has even half way 
solved it; so big that very eminent men have 
declared that it could not be solved. Are you 
going to sit by the fire warming yourself feeling 
that there is something too big for you? Are 



146 THIS MIND 

you going to go on, half trying or not trying at 
all, doubting, despairing, talking like a pessimist, 
hoping that somehow the crash will not come in 
your time? Are you going to go into your life 
endeavor with a philosophy that has always 
failed, the philosophy of "lesser breeds without 
the law," inferior castes, and "white man's 
burdens"? Do you read history to any good 
purpose at all? If so, you must see that Judaism 
broke down — as every kind of Judaism always 
does — because it was not human clear through. 
It wrecked itself as such philosophy always does, 
no matter whether it bears one name or another, 
whether it talks Hebrew, or Japanese, or German 
or English, whether it has black hair or white 
hair, or no hair, because it could not carry the 
weight of its own degrading sense of its own 
superiority and special privilege. No race, no 
nation, no person can carry that weight along 
with its natural burden of duty. 

We have got to have the mind of Christ clear 
through this problem and clear round the world. 
"We cannot get right relations between races 
out of wrong conceptions of races or wrong 
spirit toward them." We cannot save the mind 
of Christ for anything unless we use it and apply 
it to everything. Did you read this bit of 
verse that President King quotes in one of 
his books? — 



TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 147 

"Prone in the road he lay, 
Wounded and sore bested ; 
Priests, Levites passed that way, 
And turned aside the head. 
They were not hardened men 

In human service slack : 
His need was great : but then 

His face, you see, was black." 

You feel at once that this is not according to the 
mind of Christ, and that no one can be a true 
priest to humanity if he has this mind toward 
any part of humanity. For, you see, the world 
in which your life decisions will work out in life 
service is a world of many colors and races. 
Some of them are clearly less attractive than 
others. It is easy to make perfectly true criti- 
cisms of some of them. It is all too easy not 
to like them, all too easy not to believe much 
in them, all too easy to be acutely conscious of 
their defects and faults. But for you and all 
other college men and women to-day the supreme 
question is not whether some of those unlovely 
races have the mind of Christ but whether in your 
life decision and life endeavor you have and will 
have it. Your relation to this many-colored 
world is to be like his, a sacrificial, redemptive 
relation. Like him even in the presence of the 
least attractive group you must keep your pro- 
nouns straight and declare as he did, "For their 
sakes, that they may come to their own, I offer 



( 



148 THIS MIND 

myself." Of course, this is ideal, but unless 
ideals are to perish in the world, we must pre- 
serve them. Christianity has never been fully 
tried in its bearing upon race and class relations. 
It remains for us to try it, not with doubt and 
fear, certainly not partially, but wholly and 
perfectly. This is the next, the immediate adven- 
ture of the Church of Christ. The issue between 
the races will be fought out or, in this mind, 
worked out. If it is left to be fought out, there 
will be nothing left of the civilization achieved 
by the centuries. If it is worked out as it can 
be, the kingdom*of Christ may be established in 
the earth before your sun goes down. It is a 
glorious thing to be alive now and to be young. 
Foolish men say that the idealism with which 
we went into the war is all gone. Other foolish 
men even call those ideals iridescent dreams and 
call upon men now to get down to practical com- 
mon sense. Visions are in the discard in many 
circles. But from all the battlefields where our 
dead lie buried comes the cry, as Alfred Noyes 
said : "It was for visions that we fell." I repeat 
here words spoken elsewhere : 

"Shall we not now be 'swift of soul and jubilant 
of feet' to make a world without a race war, not 
in some far future when we are dead, but now? 
The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Let us repent 
therefore of race pride, race prejudice, and race 



TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 149 

bitterness; repent in America, repent in Asia, 
repent in Africa, repent in Europe. The king- 
dom of heaven is at hand. This is our gospel. 
We will not lose heart in it. Blood is thicker 
than water, and the human family is of one blood. 
We will labor everywhere to make a unity of 
spirit in the races of the whole world, j 

"The final impact of races and nations upon 
one another has not yet come. Thoughtful men 
everywhere are dreading and even fearing it. 
If that impact is to be military, then let us brace 
ourselves to wind up the world shortly by war. 
If it is to be commercial, then let us resign our- 
selves to a vulgar and debasing reign of material- 
ism and wealth, with the sun of the Spirit gone 
down in the lives of men. If the impact is to be 
economic, then let us surrender our evangel of 
love and redemption, and join the new crusade 
for economic regeneration and supremacy." 

What is the deep, final meaning of the presence 
of Chinese, Japanese, and other students in such 
numbers in American colleges? What is the 
real meaning of the Rhodes Scholarships at Ox- 
ford University? What is the actual significance 
of such movements as the World Student Federa- 
tion? Let up not allow a supreme and manifest 
providence go by without our seeing it. The 
undergraduates of to-day and the graduates of 
yesterday will be leading the nations to-morrow. 



150 THIS MIND 

Men and women who have studied together, 
played together, and prayed together on a hun- 
dred campuses, or who are now doing all that can 
make a world brotherhood of understanding, a 
world brotherhood of power, a world fellowship 
of service and consecration of such strength as 
with the living Christ can create a new outlook, 
a new motive, a new character among men. If 
the students of to-day in all these lands and from 
all these lands maintain such contact with Jesus 
Christ that they get his passion for the ideal, his 
passion for perfection, his passion for sacrifice 
and altruism, his passion for humanity as a 
whole; if these students of to-day get for all 
men the mind that was in him toward all men, 
the kingdom of heaven will come farther in their 
life time than it has in all the Christian centuries. 
College men and women from all these lands 
and in all these lands are making their life deci- 
sions to-day in the presence of the possible 
answer to Christ's prayer for the Kingdom's 
coming while their decisions are working out 
with him in life. 

For twenty years in a Southern newspaper 
every Saturday this notice is said to have 
appeared, heading the regular list of church 
services. The announcement never varies : 

"On Sunday morning at his church, and on 
Sunday afternoon at the chain gang, the Kev- 



TOWARD OTHER PERSONS 151 

erend Charles Jaggers will preach from his usual 
text." 

The announcement is always the same, and 
the text always the same: "Let this mind be in 
you which was also in Christ Jesus." 
( Let me gather up what I have tried to say : 

All vital questions are, at last, personal. 

Every calling must be tested by its meaning for 
personality. 

All our life decisions and life purposes must 
be intensely human. 

You cannot humanize your decision and work 
it out except by a sustained and Christlike effort 
to Christianize the order in which your calling 
places you. 

This must be done and can be done by the 
men and women within a given order. 

You must carry into your decision and work 
Christ's sense of human values. 

Your decision must work out as Jesus' did on 
the basis of an equal interest in people who differ 
greatly from one another, and must find its real 
expression in the religion of friendship. 

And your decisions to-day have a world mean- 
ing. 

You must, therefore, bring to your life deci- 
sions the mind of Christ as to races and nations, 
their character and their relations. Once more 
Jesus is saying, "Repent, change your attitudes, 



152 THIS MIND 

the kingdom of a new and better order is at 
hand." The youth in college to-day will have a 
chance to make a new earth such as no other 
youth have had since that other one ascended. 
This is the gleam. After it, follow it. \ 



VI 



THIS MIND TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL 
TESTS 

When an early and very able letter-writer 
wrote to some early Thessalonians, a tribe not 
yet wholly extinct, he said some things that bear 
directly to-day upon our study. Seeing that they 
were liable to look at everything from the purely 
practical, material viewpoint, he said to them: 
"Do not extinguish the fire of the Spirit. Let it 
burn steadily/' Seeing that they were liable to 
think themselves at the beginning of an era, and 
no longer to need the voices and counsels of the 
past, the teaching of the ages, or the prophetic 
element in life, he wrote : "Despise not prophesy - 
ings. Do not get proud and think the past can 
teach you nothing. And do not let the prophetic 
note die among you." Seeing that they were 
likely to apply false tests, unreal and purely aca- 
demic tests to their new experiences, their new in- 
spirations, their new teachings, he said to them : 
"Prove all these things by bringing them to the 
test of life. Then hold fast to the things that 
are actually found good for life." 

153 



154 THIS MIND 

In these sentences Saint Paul forces us up to 
essential tests and literally cuts the ground from 
under scores of philosophies and theories. Bring 
everything to the severe, living test of reality, the 
reality of the years, the reality that an immortal 
personality has the right to demand. No matter 
about the tests of novelty or of interest, or even 
of formal logic. The test of life is the supreme 
and final test. Is it good to live by? Bring 
everything to that. Then hold fast to what is 
found to be good for life. No matter what other 
values a vision or a teaching, a philosophy or a 
theology may have, if it is not good for life, it 
does not possess the final, highest good. I once 
read a statement from John Kuskin to this effect, 
not pretending that it is an exact quotation : 
"If the ghost that is in you leaves your tongue 
the tongue of a liar, your hand the hand of a 
juggler, and your heart the heart of a cheat, then 
be assured it is no holy ghost." In other words, 
our life decisions must meet all these real vital 
tests. j In view of the manifest immorality of 
certain religions as seen in their practices, I do 
not see how an honest youth can ever make a 
decision to enter their service. They are not good 
for life. That makes them impossible. Your 
life decision must bear the test of life or you are 
ruined even as you make it. 

We cannot determine things like this wholly 



TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 155 

by hard common sense. When a man says that 
he speaks as a plain business man, he usually 
means that as modestly as possible he is really 
saying the last word on the subject. And that 
might be true in purely business matters. But 
it is not likely to be true at all in regions where 
spiritual insight, spiritual vision, and a sense 
of personal, ethical values count for a good deal 
more than commercial accuracy. 
/ We are inclined also to complicate our life 
decisions by giving undue and unfruitful atten- 
tion to unreal and hypothetical questions that 
really do not bear upon the matter. A plain man 
was once a candidate for appointment under 
the civil service rules as a night watchman in 
a government building. One of the examination 
questions was: "How far is the sun from the 
earth?" The man replied, "I do not know, but 
I think it is not near enough to prevent me from 
filling this job of night watchman if I can get it." 
A good many questions are interesting but do 
not bear very directly on the question of your 
lifework. For example, there is the question of 
the age of the world, the length of time it took 
to make it, and how it was made, whether in 
longer or shorter time. One would really like 
to know the answer, and in making up a final 
philosophy of the universe, one is likely to come 
to some conclusion that will fit in with the rest 



156 THIS MIND 

of his views, but such questions are not su- 
premely important unless we are going to make 
worlds as a life occupation. A first-class teacher 
ought not to be wrecked over questions with 
which he is actually not going to be much con- 
cerned. No man ought to allow himself to be 
kept out of the kingdom of high opportunity be- 
cause of a speculative interest in a kingdom with 
which he has no real doings. Those decisions are 
most genuine and wise which meet and answer 
the largest number of life's vital questions, even 
though for the time they leave a lot of others 
untouched. And that person is most useful to 
us who gives us in his own life actual personal 
light on the largest number of these real ques- 
tions which must be answered if any life is to 
be strong, rich, and steady. 

For a moment, then, let us leave to our argu- 
ing ancestors all these questions about the age of 
the world, the method of creation, the origin of 
evil, which are important in their place, but not 
in this place, while we face our own life decisions 
on another basis, on our own basis. Life is going 
to be hard enough without dragging into it any- 
thing that does not belong there. We do not 
want it to be complicated with any artificial, 
unreal, or largely imaginary issues. We want a 
right relation to the past, but we want also a 
working relation to the present and future. We 



TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 157 

recognize two principles, the principle of con- 
tinuity and the principle of progress. Neither 
shall dominate us. We will hold on to what the 
centuries have shown to be good for life. We 
will go forward to a larger, ampler life than 
the centuries have reached. We will be respect- 
ful, but we will not be slaves. Above all, in the 
presence of that Other One, who was at Nazareth 
that day when he was at the opening of his 
career, we will be real, we will be obedient to the 
highest, and we will be whole-hearted as he was. 
Our fathers never seemed to know quite how to 
make the most of him. They worshiped him, but 
never seemed quite sure that a workaday world 
could be run on his lines. We are going to try 
it on his basis. We are going the whole length 
Avith him, on his lines, with his truth, on his 
methods. We have seen too many centuries 
mixed w T ith compromise in vital matters. We 
would like to see one unhesitatingly going his 
way w T ith him. The dangerous heresies of past 
and present do not seem to us what they seem to 
be and to have been to so many. To us the most 
dangerous, the most fatal heresy is the doubt as 
to whether a modern young man or woman can 
absolutely go Jesus' way with him, can make him 
the rule of life decision and life service. We are 
about to make our life decisions and offer our- 
selves to the Lord of our day. Let us do it in 



158 THIS MIND 

obedience to these convictions and submit our 
purpose to these tests among others : 

1. Can you in this life you propose, at the 
beginning and to the end, hold steady with the 
highest ideals? Practical men say it cannot be 
done. Moral idealism and personal integrity 
say that it must be done. Life is not worth the 
struggle unless one can maintain "truth in his 
inward parts/' and carry his flag aloft as he 
crosses the world's market place. If we have 
to compromise at this point, we might just as 
well give up and let the deluge of compromise 
and low ideals sweep over us. John Stuart 
Mill, no fanatic surely, declared there was noth- 
ing better than "so to live that Christ would 
approve our life." And the practical man, look- 
ing at things as they are, familiar with the long, 
sad centuries of surrendered ideals and compro- 
mised principles, using what he calls his com- 
mon sense, says it cannot be done. He says the 
fires of original passion cannot be kept burning, 
that slackness will get into the blood, and moral 
enthusiasm will die in the heart. That is the 
answer of the practical man who has lived 
through the dull, gray years until the glow has 
gone off from life. And if I had nothing else 
than that to say to you, I would not say that. 
That is no gospel to the youth of any age. The 
good news for youth is that the kingdom of the 






TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 159 

best life is at hand, that it is going to walk 
around on campus and street. Jesus is the 
answer to that question about maintaining ideals. 
I trust him and his opinion more than I do 
the man on the street. Jesus did it. He is the 
answer. He tried it and it worked. His opinion 
is worth its full face value. 

2. Can you in this life you propose hold fast 
to a life of truth even though it involves your 
own life and the life of and loss of your friends? 
We easily get this confused with the question of 
intellectual freedom which is so precious in it- 
self and so often utterly abused. The right to 
search freely for truth wherever it can be found, 
the right to hold the truth and to speak it in 
love whenever it is found must be held at all 
cost. But many men exhaust their interest in 
truth in the fascinating search for it, while 
others take their supreme joy in the display or 
proclamation of the truth they think they have 
found, especially if they think no one else has 
found it, sometimes without any care for human 
consequences. Of course you know how far from 
the real life of truth this is. Truth is a thing 
to be discovered, not at all forgetting that a 
good deal of it has already been discovered; 
always a thing to be believed in one's heart and 
held there with joy; always a thing to be thought 
in one's mind and to be made the law of one's 



160 THIS MIND 

thinking ; always a thing to be done and to be 
made the law of one's living. The woe that falls 
upon those who know the truth and do it not 
is a deserved woe. The desire for freedom is 
not always the same as the truthful attitude of 
mind, the acceptance of truth for life and its 
guidance on life's way. Nor is love of truth in 
one direction always accompanied by love of 
truth in all directions. For your purposes, to- 
day, knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus is 
the supreme thing. Truth as it is in the rocks, 
truth as it is in the plant, truth as it is in the 
philosophy, are all on the way, and only on the 
way, to truth as it is in the personality. And the 
compromising, prudent man on the street doubts 
the possibility of holding fast in a man's life to 
the truth. It leads so far, it costs so much, it 
so involves one's friends, and, if carried to full 
length, it causes their defection. This is a prac- 
tical world, he says, and one must neither 
attempt nor expect too much. Does not the 
Bible itself tell us not to be righteous over- 
much? Well, the answer to the whole question 
of living by the truth is that Jesus did it. He 
did not bluster nor pose, nor make himself a 
martyr to freedom of thinking, nor set himself 
up as superior, but the law of truth was in his 
life, the word of truth always on his lips. He 
bore witness to the truth in all that he said, 



TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 1G1 

all that he did, all that he was, and at last all 
that he suffered. He did everything with truth 
except doubt it, abandon it, compromise it, lower 
it, or weaken it. He is the answer to the whole 
question. When you are making a life decision 
there is no answer except the personal one. 
Lentil some better attitude to truth can be found 
than Jesus' life gives us, let us go with him. 

3. In making and pursuing a life decision can 
a man keep his faith in doing good, his enthu- 
siasm for doing good, in the face of actual defec- 
tions and genuine failures, right at the heart of 
his endeavor? 

Nothing is much harder than this. Some day, 
after years of patient, self-denying labor for 
some group, they may all turn away and leave 
you. Or after long effort you will apparently 
have nothing to show for what you have done. 
You may try to lift some lowly people, to teach 
a backward race, to reform a criminal group, or 
to uplift a degraded community. You may think 
you are making at least a measure of success out 
of it, and awaken some morning with the sicken- 
ing discovery that the whole thing has to be done 
all over again, and the more sickening doubt 
whether it can be done at all, whether the effort 
is worth while. This is the fate and experience 
of men who try. Just when you think you have 
got people free from the world's pollutions, they 



162 THIS MIND 

get entangled and overpowered again, and their 
last state is worse than the first. They see the 
way of righteousness and then turn back. The 
biblical figure of the dog and the hog is not very 
nice but wholly accurate. And when one of your 
converts or pupils falls away and goes clear 
back to the old ways, you are liable to touch zero 
in your enthusiasm and to use foolish words, 
saying that a dog is always a dog anyhow, and it 
is no use to try to do anything. And maybe 
you will say it about people — black people, red 
people, yellow people; people who speak some 
other tongue than your own; people whom you 
have carried until your back has almost broken. 
When that bitter hour comes it will have many 
elements of bitterness, but no other quite so 
bitter as the feeling that your whole life pur- 
pose was a blunder. You will say about the 
saddest words men ever speak in this world of 
ours : "What is the use of trying?" 

Now, it is wonderful to see how far that ques- 
tion went toward answer in Jesus' own expe- 
rience. He met it, met it as tragically as any one 
of you ever will. He lost the rich young man, 
who flinched and failed when he had the chance 
to back Jesus with everything he had. Many of 
the disciples turned back to their old lives. His 
own people rejected him. They failed to grasp 
his teaching, they missed the point of his real 



TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 163 

mission, they utterly misunderstood him. Tested 
by our conventional standards, his immediate, 
visible success was not very great. I can easily 
imagine his heaviness of heart as he faced his 
experiences. And I can easily see where a 
weaker spirit would have broken and let the 
whole enterprise go. But I really count that a 
superficial view of Jesus. He had the deeper, 
finer insight, the insight that gave him steadi- 
ness, that must give us steadiness. The final 
test is not the winning but the trying, though 
winning is desirable. The highest success is not 
receiving the palm but running the straight race. 
The thing Jesus did was worth doing even though 
no one followed him. The things he said were 
worth saying even though no one believed them. 
His cross was worth carrying even though he had 
to carry it alone. It is better to have tried like 
this and failed than never to have tried. That 
is the only real failure. And if you are going 
into a lifework where you will require manifest 
success all the time to keep up your heart and 
spirit in it, then be assured it is no highest life- 
work. 

I said a moment ago that I could easily im- 
agine his heaviness of heart, hear the break in 
his voice, could easily see where a weaker spirit 
would have let go. If that were all I could see, 
it would make me ashamed of my own insight 



164 THIS MIND 

into his life. The real vision here is of that 
true person never wavering as to the worth of his 
work, never losing heart in it even when it 
apparently went badly, knowing that it was 
worth doing in itself, knowing that his words 
w r ere worth saying, no matter about the popular 
vote. He wanted success, longed for followers, 
rejoiced in believers. He wept when Jerusalem 
refused his offers. He wept but did not waver or 
grow bitter. It hurt when he lost disciples. It 
hurt but did not sour or harden his spirit, or 
cause him to throw away his ideals in service. 
He kept his faith in doing good, his enthusiasm 
for doing good, in the face of losses and defec- 
tions. It can be done. He is the answer to 
your question. Years hence when in China or 
Chicago, in Terre Haute or Illinois, in ministry, 
medicine, law or farming, your simple faith in 
doing good is threatened, look back at the story 
of that Other One, who never lost that faith, 
and hold on even when all the tides seem running 
out. It can be done. He is the answer to that 
question. He is the proof and the example. 
What essential difference does our success or 
failure make to us? We may not enter the land 
of promise, as Moses did not. But we can lead 
the people in the right direction all our lives, 
always from bondage, always toward freedom. 
We can fight all the time in the good fight. We 



TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 165 

can give our .lives all the while to the high human 
enterprise. He did it. We can do it. If we do 
this as he did, we can keep our heads in the face 
either of a crowd's applause or a crowd's dis- 
approval. 

4. Will your life decision and the life service 
that follows it give youth its highest chance for 
character and service in the world? Youth is 
not wholly a matter of years. There are some 
really young people who are past fifty. They are 
not the ones who are always asserting their 
youth. And there are some very old people who 
are under thirty. The same distinction is true 
concerning the modern man. He is not modern 
just because he says so or just because he is alive 
to-day. Yet, in the main, youth does in large 
degree have reference to years, even though it is 
chiefly a thing of spirit and bearing. The work 
of making a new world must be largely done if 
done at all by the men and women now under 
thirty. If Jesus Christ does not get his chance 
with them, he will get no better chance than he 
has had through the centuries with the people 
who have got the world into its present mess. 

Now, you cannot help much if you just accept 
the first good job that comes along. One day 
they offered Jesus the job of being king. The 
short view which so many' take would have led 
him to take it. Probably all the familiar, cus- 



166 THIS MIND 

tomary, specious arguments were used to induce 
him to accept. He was doubtless told that this 
would be a wonderful chance to render a real 
service; that somebody had to be king and he 
could prevent some bad man from getting the 
place ; that such opportunities did not come often 
to men of his age, and would not likely come 
again to him. He was probably told how many 
Messiahs a prosperous king could support and 
maintain. You know or will know the whole 
list of plausible reasons for doing something else 
than the thing you ought to do. You will be 
swept off your, feet unless you are in Jesus' 
spirit. When he saw the thing coming, the thing 
that was good in itself, but bad for him, the 
thing that would have side-tracked his real life 
purpose, he withdrew from the crowd, that crowd 
that turns men's heads so easily. He went out 
to the low mountain, where no doubt he prayed 
it all over again and came back to go on with 
his own work. 

Nor can you help much if you simply bring 
youth's usual spirit to your life decision and pur- 
pose. In youth ambition is usually the compel- 
ling force, success the goal of effort. Let us 
change that in one generation. Phillips Brooks 
asked every Harvard man to give the world 
the gift of yet one more regenerated human life. 
What shall we ask and receive from DePauw to- 



TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 167 

day? Shall we look for less than one more life 
determining itself and its work according to the 
mind of Christ? An old teacher said, "Let us 
learn to think according to Christianity." Let 
us learn to think according to Christ. Away 
back in an earlier address I referred to Emer- 
son's advice about wagons and stars. A new and 
real interpretation of that old sentence has just 
appeared. The man who easily quotes it usually 
thinks it means "aim high/' but what it really 
does mean must be something like this : Tie your 
life to the highest powers. "Go where the gods 
are going. Take the direction of all good men/' 
Hitch your personal life to the noblest and best. 
Swing into the current with Jesus at its head, 
the current of that human power that keeps indi- 
vidual wagons actually going and carrying their 
load. One day an educated youth looked at 
Jesus and said, "Master, I will go along with 
you." He had hitched his wagon to the right 
star. Everything else that youth has hitched up 
with has failed. Half gods, semi-Christianity, 
partial Christianity, have all proved unequal to 
the demand made by youth's real wagons. If 
you are to get anywhere, tie your lives to Jesus 
so tight that you will get the whole upward pull, 
the whole onward pull of his life through this 
rough world. Your ancestors have tried every- 
thing else. A few have tried this. Mavbe we. 



168 THIS MIND 

can see one generation going with him in its 
choices, its purposes, and its objects. If we do 
see this, we shall see some other things that we 
are not looking for. Things will begin in a new 
way to work together for good to those who do 
this. Those who have responded to his purpose 
will find that they have his aid and interest in 
their purposes. 

Something more is called for from youth than 
revolt and revolution against the old order, what 
Sir Philip Gibbs calls "the old Gang." The 
world is sufficiently upset now. A new world is 
needed, not a new and greater chaos and ruin. 
Here are these precious materials lying in such 
disorder about us. Here are false principles 
enthroned, true principles inverted, good and bad 
principles, good and bad people, all mixed up. 
It is an awful mess and superficially I do not 
wonder at any attitude that men take. Super- 
ficially, I say, I do not wonder. But the super- 
ficial view is not the sound one. You do not 
get the true view until you get the mind of Christ 
about the world and the power of youth. If 
it were not for him and his view of this present 
world near and far, I fear I could be a wild revo- 
lutionist, a hopeless pessimist, or an out-and-out 
materialist. Maybe not. Maybe just the hope 
of there being such a Person somewhere, some 
time would hold me. For his is the saving view 



TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 169 

of a world that is hopeless without him. Indeed, 
if we had to come to our life purpose without 
him, there would be no gospel of cheer, only a 
sullen appeal to do your best in an utterly 
gloomy situation. A striking little poem 
appeared in a recent Harper's Magazine entitled 
"Voyages," by Ruth Comfort Mitchell Young: 

"A tired old doctor died to-day and a baby boy was 

born — 
A little new soul that was pink and frail and a 

soul that was gray and worn, 
And — halfway here and halfway there — 
On a white high hill of shining air, 
They met and passed and paused to speak in the 

flushed and hearty dawn. 

"The man looked down at the soft, small thing with 

wise and weary eyes, 
And the little chap stared back at him with 

startled, scared surmise : 
And then he shook his downy head — 
'I think I won't be born,' he said. 
'You are too gray and sad!' He shrank from the 

pathway down the skies. 

"But the tired old doctor roused once more at the 

battlecry of birth, 
And there was memory in his look of grief and toil 

and mirth. 
'Go on !' he said. 'It's good — and bad : 
It's hard ! Go on! It's ours, my lad !' 
He stood and urged him out of sight, down to the 

waiting earth." 

I think a thoughtful person in college this year 



170 THIS MIND 

looking out at the world ahead of him at the 
weary old men breaking down under its load 
might say with the child, "I think I won't be 
born." But not if he sees and hears that tired 
old doctor, who may perhaps be the Great Physi- 
cian who has had enough to make his soul gray 
and worn. If the new graduate hears him crying 
out : 

"Go on, it's good — and bad, 
It's hard! Go on! It's ours, my lad!" 

I think the new graduate can strike into the 
waiting years with a shout. He may even see 
that this is a fine hour in human history, when 
real men and women can begin to make a new 
to-morrow. For that is at once the privilege and 
the duty of youth. If youth simply lines up 
with the old forces, and ranges itself on differ- 
ent sides of the ruinous, selfish old groups; if 
it gives itself over to the perpetuation of the old 
industrialism, old militarism, old divisions and 
castes; if it comes in to renew the old strife or 
to find a great adventure in a new war, then 
youth will destroy civilization instead of saving 
it. Sir Philip Gibbs writes : 

"The youth of the new world that is coming 
need have no fear that peace will rob it of 
romance and adventure. The building of that 
new world upon the ruins of the old, the reshap- 



TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 171 

ins: of social relations between classes and 
nations; the pursuit of spiritual truth and 
beauty, the killing of cruel and evil powers ; the 
conquest of disease, the resurrection of art and 
poetry and lovely handicrafts, the calling back 
of song and laughter to human life, the joy of 
flight made safe from death, the prolongation of 
human life by new discoveries of science; and 
the reconciling of life and death by faith re- 
established in the soul of the world — will be 
adventure enough to last, let us say, a thousand 
years from now. 

"That is the chance of youth, standing now 
at the open door, wondering what there is to 
do and which way to take to meet the future. 
God! If I had youth again, I should like that 
good adventure, and take the chance." 1 \ 

You cannot be cynical or reactionary and 
redeem the world. If you do not bring better 
thinking, better ideals, better moral powers to 
the age than it now has, you will not save it 
from ruin. Old men are trying in old ways to 
solve old problems that have defied the old solu- 
tions. Councils and cabinets too largely 
governed by old traditions, ruled by the old 
spirit, councils and cabinets without vision, with- 
out faith, without insight into life are trying 
to fix up a world full of hate and greed and 

i More that Must be Told. 



172 THIS MIND 

suspicion, a world full of race pride, race pre- 
judice, and race ambition, so that it will run on 
a while longer before the grand smash. Youth 
is called again as it was by the Master, to make 
a new earth wherein righteousness will dwell. 
Nothing else is worth doing. This is the great 
adventure. I envy you the forty years that lie 
ahead of you, unless you strike step with the 
false leaders and join the wrong crowd. 

Have you read these lines showing the differ- 
ence between the sodden old order and the sensi- 
tive new? 

"They sit at home and they dream and dally, 

Raking the embers of long-dead years — 
But ye go down to the haunted Valley, 

Light-hearted pioneers. 
They have forgotten they ever were young, 

They hear your songs as an unknown tongue. . . 
But the Flame of God through your spirit stirs, 

Adventurers — O Adventurers !" 

But England needs no new lands or seas. 
America needs no new continents or islands for 
her adventurers. And for British youth and 
American youth there is an adventure that Drake 
and Raleigh never dreamed of, an adventure that 
only men, like Livingstone and Carey, Coleridge 
Patteson and Hannington, on one side the sea, 
men like Thoburn and Bashford on our side of 
the sea, saw. And as youth sets sail to make 



TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 173 

a new inind, a new heart, a new conscience, a 
new affection, a new relation in the whole world, 
one like unto the Son of man goes with them, 
at their head, and the new day dawns as they 
move. 

5. Your life decision and the life service that 
follows it must relate you vitally and strongly 
to those beliefs that make a victorious life. 

One of my wise friends wanted me to make 
an entire lecture on this subject. He feels keenly, 
as all thoughtful persons do, the student diffi- 
culty with his creed. And it would be a fine 
work to help clear that difficulty out of the way. 
Nevertheless I am choosing not to try it. There 
are several reasons. That subject ought to make 
an entire volume and not simply one chapter 
in a volume. Making an entire chapter out of 
it in this discussion would create a wrong im- 
pression because of the disproportionate space 
given it. And I fear, if an entire chapter should 
be given to it, that I might be tempted to make 
a creed for you ! And it would be all wrong for 
me to assume that you must believe at your age 
all the things I believe at mine, or that we should 
believe even the same things exactly alike. Be- 
liefs are so related to experience that the same 
words do not mean the same things as expe- 
rience ripens and deepens. For example, all my 
life I have repeated the words "I believe in God 



174 THIS MIND 

the Father Almighty" — and do still repeat them, 
but they mean immeasurably more than they did 
in my youth, and I cannot see what wealth they 
will finally come to have. 

These are days when many people are having 
trouble with their creeds, when many are pro- 
posing to throw all creeds overboard and go 
ahead without them. This does not seem either 
wise or possible. There is a better way. Maybe 
we can find it. Suppose we start with three or 
four general statements, some of them negative 
in form. First : Beliefs cannot be made to order, 
just once for all. They will grow and expand 
as life goes on. Second: True and "productive 
beliefs' ' are positive and not negative. A man 
does not get far simply on the basis of the things 
he does not believe. Third: Practically, beliefs 
are not all equally important or useful, not all 
equally used in one's life. There is a working 
faith, and, for most people, a set of beliefs which 
are largely kept on deposit rather than in circu- 
lation, beliefs that are not used at all. Fourth : 
Do not think you must abandon essential faith 
because on some point you feel you must differ 
from your fathers. They were not infallible any 
more than you are. You need not attribute in- 
fallibility, therefore, either to their convictions 
or your own. Especially do not regard your 
views as infallible just because they differ from 



TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 175 

your father's. Fifth : Get hold of the business of 
believing at the end of privilege instead of the 
end of duty. I do not mind confessing to you 
that I spent bitter, rebellious years, in early life, 
over the feeling that the Christian doctrines, the 
beliefs of the church, were being forced on me as 
a duty. It did not matter whether they were 
true or false, partly true or partly false. That 
was not the real difficulty. It was youth's feel- 
ing of rebellion against being compelled and 
not free. I used to wish that scared sheriff of 
Philippi had not asked what he must do to be 
saved. All that has, however, been gone for 
many happy years. There came a day when 
belief as a privilege came above the horizon, 
when the duty of it took its proper place, and 
the freedom to believe came to the front. That 
day emancipation came for myself and for many 
besides. For from that high hour when the sun 
of privilege began to shine in the sky of belief, 
I have tried to tell college men and women how 
rich they are in the things they are permitted to 
believe. Donald Hankey, the English college 
man, who lived so nobly and died so bravely, 
cried out, "True religion is betting one's life 
that there is a God." Or as an English bishop 
has just said, "It is staking our lives that the 
world is God's and that God has made himself 
known to us in Jesus Christ." It is enough to 



176 THIS MIND 

make even old blood run fast to know that youth 
has a chance to bet its life on a certainty like 
that. One night to a small company of men a 
bit older than you, Jesus said, "He that hath 
seen me hath seen Him." And every time that 
personal statement gets loose in a chapel full 
of students, the cheer leader ought to call for 
all the cheers there are because youth has a 
chance to begin its life believing in a God who is 
like Jesus Christ. Mr. Studdert Kennedy re- 
cently spoke these pungent words: "We have 
really changed our God. We have ceased bow- 
ing down before a crowned Person sitting on a 
throne surrounded by peaceful, singing angels. 
There is no such Person. He is dead — killed 
long ago. The God we worship is the God still 
suffering over the sorrows of humanity, the God 
with tears in his heart for the sorrows of this 
world— the God who is like Jesus Christ." It 
is not surprising that when belief comes at you 
the wrong-end foremost it arouses opposition and 
makes itself look difficult. But when it comes 
right-end foremost it is the finest thing on this 
planet, for it gives men and women a power 
for service, a strength for life that they cannot 
afford to miss. Beliefs may be weights to drag 
you down, to fetter, to impede, or they may be 
wings to lift, to sustain, to carry you forward. 
If I had nothing to say to you except a stern 



TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 177 

word about the hard duty of belief I would not 
be saying that, but because I can proclaim the 
glad, free, high privilege of belief it is a joy to 
speak. 

This seems to be the way Jesus got into his 
beliefs, not simply the things he taught other men 
to believe, but the things upon which he rested 
his own imperial life. It never looks like an 
enforced and unwelcome duty to him, but always 
like a sort of rapture as he faced his real life 
and supreme endeavor. He, like you, faced his 
life decision and lifeWork, and bore into the 
waiting years like a strong man into battle, be- 
cause he believed as he did. He has transformed 
belief from duty to privilege. He knows what 
it is worth. He exults in it. I do not lay down 
a body of statements to-day and tell you that 
you must believe them. I ask you to look at 
that other supreme Believer and go the whole 
length of faith with him as a royal privilege. 

I cannot go very far with certain creed-makers 
of past centuries, but I can go the whole length 
of Jesus' belief with him. He gets into it and 
gets hold of it the right way. He gets hold of 
the things that seem worth while, that seem to 
bear directly on the problem of living and work- 
ing. He never seems to regard his faith as a 
weight or a perplexity or a burden to him. There 
are places where he almost acts as if he were 



178 THIS MIND 

about to shout over the way his belief carries 
him through a task which would be impossible 
but for his faith. Things do not all look equally 
important to him. He refuses to get side-tracked 
by unessential questions. He keeps on the 
main line all the time. He does not stop to 
examine his faith. He uses it. He has the kind 
that enables him to keep full steam ahead while 
he does his essential work. Into it with him ! 
You do not know yet what it is worth to you to 
be able to believe certain things. Face to face 
with the task of making k new humanity, think 
how fine it is to be strong in this : "I believe in 
God, the Father Almighty." Face to face with 
the task of teaching the world the words of 
eternal life, think of this : "I believe in the words 
of Jesus." Face to face with the world's im- 
purity, its bitter hate, its cruel selfishness, think 
how rich you are in such belief as this : "I believe 
in the clean heart; I believe in the service of 
love; I believe in the unworldly life." Face to 
face with the world's moral confusion, its low 
and broken ethical ideals, the practices that 
ruin life, think of your strength for your re- 
demptive toil in any field because you can say, 
"I believe in the beatitudes and in the new life 
for man." This is not hard duty. This is life's 
exalted privilege. That way, with Jesus, I want 
you to look at your beliefs. Believe him, believe 



TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 179 

with him, go the whole length of faith with 
him. There will be mysteries, there will be per- 
plexities and difficulties, but this way with him 
leads to assurance, to power, and to victory. 
Your creed may begin by being brief and simple, 
but this way with him leads to riches of belief 
that cannot now be told. Only be very sure that 
as you face your life decision and lifework your 
beliefs are vital because they are personal. If 
you are making your contact with belief through 
Jesus Christ, there can be no uncertain outcome. 

"Not what, but whom I do believe, 

That, in my darkest hour of need, 

Hath comfort that no mortal creed 
To mortal man may give — 
Not what, but whom! 

For Christ is more than all the creeds, 

And his full life of gentle deeds 
Shall all the creeds outlive. 
Not what I do believe, but ivhom! 

Who walks beside me in the gloom? 

Who shares the burden wearisome? 

Who all the dim way doth illume, 

And bid me look beyond the tomb 
The larger life to live? 
Not what I do believe, but whom! 
Not what, but whom!" 

Howard Bliss gave his life to being a mis- 
sionary in Syria. Evidently he had to deal with 
the young Syrian on a very direct and immediate 
basis. This was his last word to his generation 



180 THIS MIND 

through the Atlantic Monthly a few months 
ago: 

"Does Christ save you from your sin ? 
Call Him Saviour! 

"Does He free you from the slavery of your pas- 
sions? 
Call Him Kedeemer! 

"Does He teach you as no one else has taught you? 
Call Him Teacher! 

"Does He mold and master your life? 
Call Him Master! 



"Does He shine upon the pathway that is dark to 
you? 
Call Him Guide ! 



"Does He reveal God to you ? 
Call Him the Son of God ! 

"Does He reveal Man? 
Call Him the Son of Man !" 

"Or, in following Him, are your lips silent in your 
incapacity to define Him and His influence 
upon you? 

Call Him by no name, but follow Him !" 

• 

Finally: Will your life decision and the life- 
work that follows it enable, and even compel you, 
to make "full, perfect, and sufficient'' response 
to the everlasting pressure of God's life upon 
your own? The deepest fact in all personal life 



TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 181 

is the direct and constant action of God upon 
it. We do not thrust ourselves unasked upon 
him. Long before any of us answered he was 
calling. Some of us do not hear him clearly 
because we keep too far away, or because our 
ears are dull, or because too many other sounds 
distract our hearing. But no passion of re- 
sponse that the best of us will ever make will 
come anywhere near equaling the passion of his 
call to us. We do not set the current of service 
and devotion running. We do not create all 
these high principles and try to force them upon 
him as though he had not thought of 
them. Jesus is not the living definition of the 
devotion we have created and offered to God. 
He is the passionate expression in personal life 
of God's own devotion to human life. God 
offered Jesus to us. He is God's eternal call to 
us, God's call to every one of us. 

Even Jesus felt that. "My Father worketh, 
and I work." God is the chief Adventurer, the 
supreme Burden-Bearer, the most self-sacrificing 
Person in his universe. He knows that you can- 
not do any great work in the world, or give 
any great idea to the world, unless you give your- 
self to it. Nor can he. The cause consumes him 
as it must consume you. He does not drive men 
where he does not go. He calls them to go with 
him. He goes across No Man's Land and over 



182 THIS MIND 

the top with his comrades. I have tried to out- 
line the principles upon which your life decisions 
should be made, but all the while I have had in 
my mind that "man has no end which is not also 
God's"; that "all the great flaming enthusiasms 
of history have been born of God"; that "the 
best of all is God is with us." I have not been 
trying to create a philosophy for the guidance of 
youth. If these addresses should be read by any 
numbers of the young men and women in 
America's colleges, I should not want them to 
find here only or chiefly my views as to their 
lives. I am trying to find Jesus' way into his 
own life under the direct, steady, unhindered 
pressure of God upon his life. That is the only 
philosophy by which I am willing to have the 
youth of to-day guided in its supreme decision. 
I have tried to discover Jesus' response to God's 
will on one hand and the world's need on the 
other. And in his spirit, after his manner, I 
want modern youth to make its response with 
its life. His response led him to absolute devo- 
tion, to white and shining unselfishness, to 
Calvary and its cross at last. And you can think 
as hard as you wish, can look squarely at all the 
other lives of history, but you cannot think of 
another life equal to this. He had one life to 
live, one death to die. He lived and died as such 
a person ought to have done. The world of our 



TOWARD LIFE'S ESSENTIAL TESTS 183 

day, like the world of his earthly day, is very 
weary and very needy ; weary of everything else, 
needy of him. Our day is still his day. It is in 
our hands to make it his day as no other day 
has ever been. I am not saying or caring much 
whether you shall do it in one calling or an- 
other, but, looking at Jesus Christ as he stands 
related to our world to-day, looking at the whole 
world and its need of him, in these breaking 
years; looking at you with the future in your 
hearts and with life in your hands, I wait as 
he waits to hear again the words spoken by a 
young scholar long, long ago : "Master, I will 
go with you wherever you go." 

This is life's fine adventure. Let us take it 
with him. "Rise, let us be going." 



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